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.

She lights up like a
firefly whenever you're
around, George Bailey.

Once a year. Each year.
They emerge, sparkling,
to be packed away.

The delicate glass,
like breath on a windowpane,
glitters and is gone.

This year, glass soldiers
wait, tissue-wrapped with angels,
in muffled darkness.

I hear your silence
echoing through the carols
louder than church bells.

If the glass shatters,
but you aren't there to hear it,
does it make a sound?

I was one of only five people on the planet who didn't own a copy of Thriller, largely because I like to be contrary; it allows me to feel superior and rebel against alcoholic absolutism by being absolute in a different direction. But because I grew up in the 80's, I couldn't escape knowing every song on the album whether I owned it or not. (And then secretly singing them to myself when there was no one around to see me being anything less than contemptuous of their choices.)

When Michael Jackson's skin whitened and his nose became skeletal, when he was accused of child molestation and and sued for debt, when there were reports that he bought the Elephant Man's bones, when he nicknamed his son Blanket and built an amusement park in his back yard, when the tabloids dubbed him Wacko Jacko, I liked to tell people "I told you so. I always thought there was something wrong with him." As if that were really the reason I pretended to disdain him when he was at the height of his popularity and continued to mock him as his untreated mental illness* played out on a global stage.

But my relationship with Michael Jackson (as with so many people in and out of my life) has changed as my relationship to myself in recovery has changed. Instead of seeing him as someone to mock in order to feel clever and healthy, I started to see a someone who was aching enough inside to have visibly mutilated (or paid his plastic surgeons to mutilate) his body. I saw a talented man who lived imprisoned in his own deep pain, a man who self medicated through fantasy in many of the same ways I had myself. As I came to better understand my own love of Peter Pan and the fantasy of Disney and my own desire to escape into some fantasy childhood, I suspected I better understood his too. And I used to, in my own way, pray for him. I thought about how hard it must be for someone so insulated from the world by money and fame to finally reach a point low enough to break through denial and bring desperation for change, and I would hope that he would finally lose enough to get help.

When I learned of Michael Jackson's death, I felt the same sadness I felt at the death of my father-in-law: the grief that he died without ever finding relief, redemption or recovery (in its broadest sense) in this life. But I am grateful, as I see my own progress mirrored in my changing perceptions of him, that I can finally crank up "Thriller" and spin a bit in his honor.

It was raining the night I first kissed my husband. The wind was hissing and howling through the bare branches of the trees, rattling the last of the dead leaves still clinging to their posts. Before we kissed, we twined our hands together and watched our arms weave against each other like snakes, mahogany and golden. And when at last, softly, lip met lip, I wanted to rush out into the wind and rain and throw my arms out and laugh wildly or scream at the sky, like Ophelia drowning or Lear going mad in the storm. I couldn't resist him, nor he me, and the intensity of the pleasure in that kiss rode the edge of being blinding pain. It was the kind of high that addicts seek to return to and sustain forever, that I, in my own issues around love and romance and sex, have always wanted to return to again and again with Mark.

Last night, the kids were asleep and after a long busy week, Mark and I finally had a moment alone together. We were lying in bed and he twined his hand into mine, a sweet prelude, just like that night we first kissed. Only this time the contrast -- between what magic I thought we had back then and all the craziness of addiction and fantasy and delusion and denial that overlaid it and everything else since -- was too much for me. I burst into tears and Mark said, "Whoa, you're sad. What's the matter?"

I fumbled to explain where that gesture, so reminiscent of an earlier time, had taken me and said, "You know, people who are just starting recovery sometimes ask me if it ever stops hurting. And I tell them it does, mostly. But I say that sometimes it comes back, just not as strong. This is one of those times. It's better, but the pain's still there. Sometimes I just miss that fantasy, that irresistible passion. I miss the person I used to be, when sex didn't seem so complicated."

I put my head on Mark's chest and he stroked my hair and shoulder while I lay there feeling angry and disgusted at myself for being so caught up in the past and in the unknown that I couldn't enjoy an intimate moment right here in the present. I worried that Mark would be angry at me and level the charges at me that I'd heard others had leveled at them (and that I'd even leveled at others myself): that I was "freaking out," being "neurotic" and "overly emotional," being a stereotypical woman "too uptight" to have sex. I mean, geez, why didn't I just say I had a headache while I was at it? I imagined he wanted me to "get over it" so that he could get his needs met without having to deal with my troublesome and annoying emotions. And I thought about a conversation I had with a friend who said healing from the violation and trauma of being in a relationship with a sex addict has similarities to healing from the violation and trauma of rape, and I tried (without much success) to be forgiving of myself for still struggling sometimes, even six years after disclosure.

Then Mark interrupted my thoughts as he ran his hand over my shoulder, sighed happily and said, "I love you, and I'm so glad to be here with you!" I looked up at his face, and he was beaming. "God is good!" he said, almost laughing with happiness. What? No sex and he, the sex addict, was still happy? To be here with me? Wow. I snuggled in close and kissed him, and then I started laughing. "You know," I said, "just a minute ago, I was missing that irresistible passion and addictive inability to say no. I was thinking it was the sexiest thing in the world and I was never going to be able to get moments like that back. Now, a minute later, I'm seeing the ability to say no as such a gift, and I don't have to get back there, because recovery is looking pretty darn sexy on you..."

My daughter, Janie, found the body. Our pet* had been missing for a while, so at first she shouted to me excitedly. She found him! But when I ran to her, it was clear that he was already gone. She looked from his still body up at me and asked, tentatively, "Is he very hurt, Mama?" There was a pause, where I knew that this was the moment I was supposed to do that magical mama thing. I was supposed to kiss the boo boo, mend the tear, put the pieces back together, paste the petals back in place. I was supposed to fix it. I was supposed to make it better. But I had to admit, with tears in my eyes, that he was more than hurt, he was dead. And I couldn't fix that.

Janie's grief was overwhelming and instantaneous. She sobbed until she couldn't breathe and cried until her red eyes were swollen nearly shut. I had to carry her in to the living room and place her on the sofa where she clung to me and wept. Her brother Austen hovered nearby. "I'm sad," he said, in a simple statement of facts, "but I'm not crying." After a while, Janie wanted to sit with the body, so I wrapped it in a towel and we sat together, crying, as we watched its stillness.

I told the children we would need to bury it; the life was gone and the body had to return to the earth now. While Austen accepted and even seconded this idea, Janie was, at first, vehemently against putting the body in the ground. But as she watched it, not moving, she asked what would happen to the body. I told her it would slowly decay and transform, like the dead bird we saw wasting away earlier this spring, shrinking and dissolving to just feathers and bones. If we put it into the earth, it would transform into rich soil and nourish plants. She liked the idea of new life in a plant, so she and I prepared a plant and something to contain the body. She drew pictures of herself, crying, to lay in the grave and a note with hearts and our pet's name to say goodbye. Austen said he would like to do something too. So, he took a Sharpie marker and on the towel I had wrapped the body in he wrote, in block letters, the label: "DEAD ANIMAL." Mark dug the grave and we each threw a handful of dirt on the body before placing the new plant on top.

Over the intervening weeks, each child has continued to process the loss. Janie focused first on death: pointing out dead grass, dead leaves, dead bugs wherever she went and telling me they were dead like her pet. However, I've noticed a gradual shift to thoughts of rebirth. At first, she expressed hopes and wishes for the body and spirit of her lost animal, but more recently she has spent a lot of time tending the plant that sits over the grave, drawing pictures of it, talking about it. Two weeks after the burial, she talks very little about the pet itself, although the loss is still clearly on her mind.

Austen, on the other hand, talks about the lost pet each day. He continues to express, always very matter-of-factly, that he feels sadness and misses the lost animal, even though he continues to appear (to the world at large) not to show it. He talks about how things might be if his pet were still alive: what it might be doing and feeling and thinking at any given moment. And he seems very concerned (in a way that many would find totally un-autistic of him) about how the animal parents and siblings of our pet might react to its loss. He wonders if its mother would be angry or sad to know that it was dead, and he hopes she doesn't find out, so that she won't know the pain. He wonders if its siblings would miss it and feel sad that it's gone.

As for me, I cried writing this post, so I know I'm still grieving the loss — and feeling my children's grief as well as my own.

This week, when our family pet went missing and later turned up dead, I did an obsessive imitation of some of my favorite literary detectives; like Sherlock Holmes, I tried to piece together the smallest clues and like Hercule Poirot, I strained the little grey cells of my brain looking for answers. How and when did he get out? When did he die? What did I miss or overlook? I tried to pinpoint the time of death, doing google searches for information on when rigor mortis sets in in animals. I tried to talk to witnesses, questioning everyone from my five-year-old daughter to my husband on what they last remembered seeing and hearing. I had theories, but no way to confirm them. No answers.

And what difference would answers have made? The answers wouldn't have changed anything, but they would have given me the illusion of control. Next time, I wouldn't let those thousand little circumstances that led to tragedy play out in quite the same way, would I? I wouldn't choose that same moment to go get food ready. I wouldn't ask my husband to run that same errand. I wouldn't have my daughter help me with that chore. I wouldn't let my pet out of my sight. Still I was desperate to know; I felt that somehow knowing would calm my grief. And I was angry and frustrated that I couldn't know. There simply weren't enough data points, not enough evidence, not enough pieces to make out the picture in the puzzle.

Then — because life, because the universe, because God likes to beat me over the head until I learn — my daughter misplaced her favorite stuffed bedtime companion, Gigi, and I had to run through the detective work all over again. When did she last have Gigi? Did the babysitter see her at bedtime? Had my husband seen her the night before? Had she taken Gigi out of the house? Should I search the trash? The yard? The car? The closet? Should I tear the sofa apart again and search under the cushions more thoroughly? And again I couldn't know. I just couldn't gather enough information to solve the mystery.

After a night of sleep, I discovered Gigi in the morning, buried under a pile of other stuffed toys in my daughter's closet. No one remembered having put her there. Someone (daughter? playmate? babysitter? husband? son? me?) scooped Gigi up and dumped her in the closet. We never would know who and it didn't matter. Yet I had tortured myself the night before in my own quest to know the unknowable, both in Gigi's disappearance and in that of our pet.

When my husband disclosed his addiction, I went through the same thing: grilling him for hours each day on exactly what had happened, trying to solve the mystery and create that nice, neat narrative that came at the end of the detective stories of my youth. But some parts of the story were lost forever. There were no answers. Early on, I thought that recovery might help me to understand addiction enough to at least fill in the blanks, like researching the rigor mortis of the marriage I thought I had. Instead, I'm recognizing that accepting what is — and letting go of my obsessive need to have all the answers — is where my recovery is taking me today.

I've been giving a lot of thought recently to the 12 Step saying: "Let go and let God." I was talking to a (non-program) friend about those words a few weeks ago and she asked, "What does that mean? Let go and let God? I don't get it." And as I struggled to formulate an answer, I found myself approaching the words anew.

I've had a lot of letting go I've needed to do lately. Among other things, we suffered the death of a pet this week, and death is the ultimate letting go. And at this very moment, Gigi, the stuffed animal that soothes my daughter Janie to sleep each night, is missing. I've torn the house apart and can't find it. I can't remember where we last saw it. I don't know if she had it last night because a babysitter put her to sleep. But she can't sleep without it, right? It must have been here. But what if it wasn't. Was Wednesday the last time I saw it? Is she going to lose this love so soon after our dear pet? I'm having trouble letting go of clinging to the idea of Gigi like a scared child myself.

And in the clinging, there's the knowledge that I must let go. And I come back to those words "let go and let God." I always took them to mean "let go of control and let God take charge," but I've realized they mean a whole host of things "let go of hurt and let God heal" or "let go of isolation and let God in" or "let go of fear and let God soothe." Right now I'm thinking, "Let go of pain and guilt and sadness over my inability to keep Janie safe from all life's losses and let God take care of her."

I have a secret. I have been grieving over my children since, at times, before they were even born. Now that's not the way it's supposed to be, is it? I'm a mama, and mamas are supposed to be joy and love and acceptance for our whole lives long, from the moment of conception onward. At least, good mamas are. If we have expectations that aren't met, we're supposed to toss them out for all we do have, without a hint of regret; we're not to pack them away gently in the box with the baby clothes, stored in the attic because we can't quite bear to part with them yet.

My lowest moments in parenting -- the ones I want to stuff away in shame and never let my children or the world see -- are the ones where I couldn't accept that my children were themselves rather than my vision of them. They're the times I grieve the loss of what never was, and now go on to grieve the grieving.

My son Austen was only a few weeks old when I held the Worst Mother in History awards ceremony and handed myself the trophy. The qualifying event took place around 2 or 3 a.m. when my son was just a few weeks old. (No one else made it to the ceremony at that hour, but that was ok; I had no competition -- I never do -- since I am always running against myself, beating my previous lows. Those imagined, perfect other moms don't get to run.) Unlike other babies -- the TV babies, the parenting book babies, the babies with good moms who did things right -- my son wouldn't sleep anywhere but in my bed next to my body, which my (ex) pediatrician said was BAD and DANGEROUS.

So, on the night of my first worst moment as a parent, I nursed him for what felt like the two hundredth time and gently placed him in his bassinet for the two hundredth time, only to have him scream like the fuzzy warm blankets were full of blood-burning fire scorpions, the same way he had every single time I'd tried this for the twenty or thirty nights in a row. And that scream broke me. Bone tired and viciously angry, I picked him up roughly, looked him straight in his tiny screaming face and whispered, with venom and hatred in my voice, "You are a bad baby!" Oh. My. God. What was I saying? Was I insane? I was berating a tiny baby for... Being a baby. I broke down crying in exhaustion and shame, took him into the BAD, DANGEROUS bed, and was silently grateful that he was too tiny to see that I had been disappointed in him. Already. At a few weeks old.

When Austen was a year old, we went to a mama and baby music class. Now that's the kind of thing good mamas do, right? There I was, enriching my child's mind already at one. But he was having none of it. A class full of toddlers is never a model of disciplined attention, but even here I could see he was... different. He didn't have any interest in the bright, perky teacher or the other kids or even the musical instruments, which used to make him flinch and frown. He'd wander away from the circle where everyone else was engaged and stand staring out the window. I'd try to coax him back, thinking, "Why can't you be like the others? What am I doing wrong?" I was so traumatized by the feeling of something off, that we didn't sign up for another session.

A year later, when he still wasn't speaking and psychologists and therapists were starting, amidst a battery of tests, to whisper the word "autism," we tried a Gymboree class. "He needs to work on socializing with other children," they said. Again, there were all the other kids, enraptured at story time, while my son crawled through the same tunnel over and over and over again, alone. I'd get in the car, strap him into his car seat and sob quietly over the steering wheel, not wanting him to see that he'd disappointed me again before he'd even reached the age of three. And again, when the session ended, I couldn't bear to go back, but by that time it was clear he needed more than a Gymboree class anyway.

It was around this time that I found out I was pregnant with my daughter Janie. I was a little late and had been feeling a little queasy, so I took a home pregnancy test. My husband and I wanted a second child, eventually, but right then we were completely overwhelmed by Austen's needs. We weren't planning a pregnancy and had been using birth control. I took the test: thinking it would set my mind at ease, but fearing it would not. When that second line came up to indicate I was pregnant I sobbed, big heaving sobs of sorrow, the kind a mama is never supposed to sob when she finds out she's carrying the precious little life she's going to love and cherish. Already, before she was born, Janie disappointed me. Just by being. Being at the wrong time. I didn't feel worthy to be her mother.

I love Austen. He brings a richness and beauty to my life that wouldn't have been there if he had been the child I expected. So I don't want to admit that there was ever even a moment when I didn't love and cherish him exactly as he was, when I wanted something different, when I wanted him without the autism and his sensory issues I hadn't planned or expected. I love Janie. She's brought joy to my life that I couldn't have imagined. So I don't want to admit there was ever even a moment when I didn't want her at all or at least not when she happened to come. I don't want to admit that I had to grieve Austen's autism or grieve Janie's conception before I could arrive at the love and acceptance mamas are supposed to give as naturally as breathing. Yet I did. Shh! Don't tell anyone.