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.

"Worry Brain, your mama's so ugly, she makes onions cry!" I found myself saying after I got off the phone with my husband.  I had to hang up the phone because I'd burst into tears, and now I was trying to beat back the anxiety that was consuming me.  I'd read a book on helping children cope with anxiety that suggested we learn to mock the part of our brain that produces those irrational, anxious thoughts.  As a feminist, sometimes I worry that I shouldn't use ugly mama jokes on it, but then I remind myself that's probably just my Worry Brain trying to get out of having its mama called ugly.

The company Mark works for is on shaky ground.  There have been layoffs and the people he knows that have been let go have had a hard time finding new jobs.  But I wasn't worried about that.  I was worried because he had a job interview.  For a really good job.  That pays a lot more than what he makes currently.  Working in an industry he's really interested in.  And the interview went well.  Crazy to be worried about that?  The job is (gasp!) in another state.  We'd have to move.  And the thought of that level of change grips me with anxiety.

I started whirring right into a panicked overdrive, "Fine.  I'll just tell him he can go, but I'm staying here with the kids.  I can't believe he'd pick a job over us!  And if we're not there, he'll probably just go on an incredible acting out spree.  He'll pretend he's not married and have sex all over some new town.  But I can't move, can I?  It took a year for Austen to be able to sleep through the night the last time we moved, and we stayed in the same area.  We'd have to find new 12 Step meetings and new doctors and new friends and a whole new set of resources for Austen.  And for crying out loud, we are a mixed race family and I look like a crazy bohemian.  We can't just move anywhere.  People will burn crosses on our lawn and the neighbors will tear the Darwin fish off my car and kill us.  We're safe here.  Everything is familiar here.  Everything is under control here."

That's when I brought out the big guns and called my Worry Brain's mama ugly.  (I mean she had to be ugly.  She was a big slimy brain, right?)  Mark still has a job.  He hasn't lost his job.  He hasn't been offered a new job.  Even if he were offered the job, we'd have time to discuss it and decide what's right for our family.  No need to try to soothe my anxiety by jumping on the computer and spend the next two hours doing Internet research on school districts a thousand miles away (although I was sorely tempted to), not when I can use my prodigious recovery skills to stay in the moment and tell myself ugly mama jokes instead.

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.

"Do you remember what you said to me when I first started talking about God?" Mark asked the other day, "You said, 'I am willing to try to work through this sex addiction crap, but if you ever become a Christian, I swear, I will leave you!'"

"Really? I said that?!"

"Yes, you did."

"That's completely insane, and exactly like something I would say," I laughed.

When I first started recovery, God was scary to me. God meant the stern guy with the beard on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. God meant anger and smiting and judgment. God meant the Christian church of my youth, the one that hadn't worked for me, the one with the one-size-fits-all "right" answer for everyone, the one I felt I had been burned and betrayed and disrespected by even more than my husband. God didn't seem like a path to recovery and healing, God seemed like a wedge that could force us apart. I remember looking desperately for some non-12-Step recovery programs, something we could attend without having to bring God into our lives.

I knew that the church and I weren't getting back together, so I was terrified that if Mark's path did lead him there, he was going to leave me, looking like a fool for having tried to work on our marriage. I had a fabulous fear scenario mapped out in my mind where he would join a big church community and ask me to join him, knowing I would say no, in the same way he used to ask me to go out with him on nights he knew I was busy and to cover up the fact that he had already scheduled a rendezvous with someone else. He would spend his Sundays away from me and have horrible affairs with women in the church until he eventually left me for some codependent Christian woman who was really into Christian sex addicts. Then his whole church would piously mock me and say I deserved to have my marriage fall apart for being such a heathen and it wouldn't have happened if I had worked harder and done better to join the right religion. Yep, the mention of the word "God" (of all things) would have my vivid, fear-based imagination straight at affairs, abandonment and widespread mockery in seconds flat.

At the time, I couldn't envision a world where we could have different spiritual beliefs and still respect each other. So to counteract this, in those first months of recovery, I alternately threatened to divorce him if he found the wrong kind of God and then dragged him off in a panic to meditation centers and temples, hoping I could get him to latch onto some other religion, hoping I could convert him before he got a chance to try to convert me.

The meditation centers never did stick for Mark, although they did (as I suspected they would) for me. Six years into this journey, I've found that those fears never played out. Mark and I don't seem to have exactly the same vision of God or the same ways of connecting, but we do respect each other's spiritual beliefs, and we've each seen the healing that our respective spiritual paths have brought us. I've slowly reclaimed the word God for myself and lost the fear that used to haunt it. I can laugh at the idea that I was so scared of that dreaded three-letter word that I would rather have run away from my marriage than endured it. And I can laugh with joy when Mark says "God is good" right out loud, in the middle of a tense moment, and I find it delicious and intimate and healing.

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..."

Like many people, I walked into my first 12 Step meeting never expecting to wind up there, with no clue what to expect other than what Hollywood had taught me (which I soon learned was nothing accurate). The meetings I first started attending were for friends and family members of sex addicts, and they were tiny, just four or five women sitting in a circle in a church meeting room. After lengthy, scripted readings (those fifteen to twenty minutes certainly never make it into the movies), there would be time for "sharing."

Because our group was small, sharing was less structured than in larger groups. Anyone who wanted to speak would simply pipe up, "Hi, my name is..." followed by her name, and would talk, uninterrupted, until she was done or a timer beeped to signal her few minutes were up, whichever came first. Then there would generally be a long silence. I don't know what everyone else was doing during that time, whether they were thinking about what to say or taking in what had been said, but I know what I was doing: feeling breathless under the oppressive weight of the silence and struggling to figure out how I could break it. The silence was like an invisible telephone call from some 12 Step collection agency; the imaginary phone would ring and ring for an hour while I tried to ignore it, "Come on, pick me up! Come on, talk! If you don't, this is just going to go on forever." Wasn't someone going to pick that dang thing up? Did it have to be me?

And then there were the rules against crosstalk (which are rarely obeyed in dramatized 12 Step meetings because they make things so, well, undramatic) making the whole situation even more challenging. I couldn't open a conversation with the person who just spoke. I couldn't ask questions or give advice. I had to come up with something to say about emme/em (of all things). And to this whole room of strangers, sitting there without a word, thinking who knows what about me.

I gradually became more comfortable speaking up, and I even grew to like and appreciate the rules against crosstalk, but the silence, for a much longer time, continued to feel awkward and tense, something it was someone's job to fix. It's only recently that I've noticed how little I hear that invisible phone ringing for me now and how I've started to see those silences differently: as spaces that just are, like natural pauses between breaths. And while I'll still check in with myself to see whether or not there's anything I want to say, it will usually be just that: a quick check in, not a desperate scramble for words. If I find I don't have anything to share, I'll try to use my time wisely and join in the silence.

Today, I ran into a situation that would have caused me enormous frustration in the past. I'd finished my work around the house, I'd eaten my lunch, I'd even written a blog post about how I couldn't write a blog post and I was left with a stray five minutes before my daughter was due home from school. Five minutes. Ugh! I can't get anything done in five minutes...

Oh, sure. I know there are efficiency experts out there who will say there's plenty that can be accomplished in five minutes. Make a phone call! Dash off an e-mail! Chop some vegetables for dinner! Throw in a load of laundry! And maybe other people can actually make those things happen in five minutes, but emI/em can't. I pick up the phone and am on hold for the full five minutes and then have to hang up without having accomplished my goal. I spend five minutes thinking about how to respond to that e-mail I'm supposed to dash off an answer to or looking for a clean knife and getting out the cutting board or collecting socks from under the furniture. And of course, there's always some better way to organize my kitchen or my laundry or to train myself to be faster at e-mail or to multi-task on the cell phone so I never have to drop that call. I tried, but still, those odd little chunks of time — five minutes, seven minutes, two minutes here and there — used to kill me. The brisk efficiency I expected of myself continually eluded me.

Fortunately, recovery has taught me that there is value in slowing down, in accepting my limitations, in not rushing to eke productivity out of every last moment. It has brought me the tools of prayer and meditation: tools I can use anywhere, with no need for special equipment or organization, and at any time, even the space of a single breath. So, instead of rushing to squeeze some task into those last five minutes before school let out, I sat down, followed my breath and watched my mind do its crazy dance. Then I got up and met my daughter, calm and centered, having made better use of my time than I ever did when I was striving hardest to use it wisely.

Meditation has been a great help to me in recent years, helping me calm and center myself. For the last several months, I have been sitting with a group once a week and meditating for forty-five minutes. I have been meditating regularly for shorter periods of time, but I still find that stretch of forty-five minutes to be incredibly difficult. And I've noticing a pattern lately.

When I first sit down, my mind is tumbling forward and my body is tense, as if I've been moving fast but inertia prevented me from noticing or feeling the movement until the brakes are now applied. I spend the first five or ten minutes gradually slowing down and relaxing.

The next ten or fifteen minutes are blissful. I'm relaxed and focused. I hit my meditation high. And on days where I'm not sitting with a group, this is where I stop, full of good feeling.

But after that little bit of lightness, the pain in my back (which is my constant companion, but usually remains at a dull ache) begins to feel excruciating and my feet become numb. After about a half an hour of sitting, I slowly move my feet and wiggle my toes, determined not to cling so much to pride in my stillness that I tumble down at the end, as I did the very first time I sat in meditation. Even with that slight movement, I feel panicky and every part of me is straining to get up, to move, to talk, to run away. I wonder how much longer I have to sit here before the sitting is over. I wonder why I'm doing this.

The last few minutes are agony. I'm done concentrating on my breath. I can't think of anything but getting up. I know I'm almost done and just will myself to sit a little longer. I tell myself I can wait five more minutes and then I'm going to have to stand up no matter what. So I start to count, not my breaths, but the seconds. When I get to 300, I will know I've done my five minutes. I've never gotten that far before the singing bowl chimes, signaling an end to the meditation.

Then the theme song to emRocky/em plays in my head, and I feel elated again. I'm the badassest ever! I did it! I sat still! And I'm struck with amazement that it can possibly be hard to sit on my ass for forty five minutes, when — with a book in my hand or computer on my lap or TV roaring in front of me — I can gladly sit on and on and on without even the need to eat. But as I finally stand up, I feel so much more conscious of every detail, so much more awake, that I remember, "Ah, this is why I do this," knowing that next week, when I'm in the midst of it, the cycle will likely repeat: I'll end up counting out the last few seconds in desperation, wondering why I'm doing it, until my feet on the floor again remind me.

When I was a child, my mother used to drag me off to church every Sunday. Oh, how I hated it, and I told her so. "I hated going to church when I was little too," she told me, "But then, when I was older, things got hard, and I found comfort in those rituals from my childhood. One day, you are going to need God, and you will have this to come back to." When my life started to spin out of control five years ago -- when both autism and sex addiction simultaneously became part of the language of our household -- I knew she was at least partially right; I did need a higher power to lean on, but I was still too deeply bitter toward the religion of my youth to derive comfort from it. So, I did what any twenty-first century spiritual seeker would do: I googled "Buddhism" and found a meditation center within a somewhat reasonable driving distance.

I asked my husband to accompany me to a newcomers' meditation session, hoping both for support and to, er, "persuade" him to walk this particular spiritual path with me. I had never meditated or been to a Buddhist ceremony before before, and I listened nervously to the instructions, hoping to get everything just right and not appear to be what I actually was: clueless. I was unfamiliar with the practices and rituals; the very things my mother had hoped to provide for me. I wouldn't have to wander into a church and figure out what to do with the holy water or how to give the proper response to the priest's call, but here I was lost. And I didn't know how to be vulnerable without seeming weak, so when the instructor reassured us that it would be hard to sit still, I took it not as comfort and encouragement, but as a challenge. This at least I was going to get right. Other people might not be able to sit still, but I was going to be the best meditator ever. I was going to win the meditation medal. I was going to show them all who could sit still.

So I sat. For forty five minutes. And didn't move an inch except for the soft rise and fall of my breath. I could feel my legs aching and my feet falling asleep, but I didn't budge. I heard other people rustling around and laughed internally, because I was totally winning. A chime sounded, ending the meditation, and I felt disoriented but triumphant. I couldn't feel my feet at all. Everyone else was standing up, so I (being the gold medalist newcomer) tried to follow along dutifully, but my foot — cramped, bloodless and numb from sitting — couldn't bear the weight. I heard a loud pop as my ankle buckled and I collapsed on the floor in front of a room of silently stunned Buddhists, who very kindly gathered me up from the floor and told me they'd been there too once.

And the winner is? Not me. I hobbled out, leaning on my husband and shivering from shock and embarrassment. We went off to the closest emergency room to have my rapidly swelling ankle x-rayed and diagnosed as a bad sprain, but fortunately not a break.

The foot healed slowly, but my ego not so much; it was (thankfully) quite shaken. Since then, I have been keeping up a meditation practice in my own home, but I hadn't been back to the meditation center in years. There were lots of good reasons, of course. I have two young children, and it's hard to get away. But the main thing holding me back hasn't been my busy schedule, it has been fear. This is something new, something I don't know, something I have to learn from scratch. And there is nothing scarier for me than learning, than admitting I don't know, than being vulnerable.

I promised myself that I would finally go back. It has taken five years of recovery work to feel like I could even make that promise to myself and another two months to work up the courage to carry out that resolution once I had made it. This week, I went back at last. I was anxious every mile of road I drove and every step I walked to get in. I didn't chant the right words or bow at all the times I was supposed to. And as I sat in meditation, my chest tightened with fear when I felt my foot falling asleep. I didn't sit perfectly still. In fact, I didn't perfectly anything. But I showed up. And this time I was willing to admit that there was lots I didn't know and I was willing to admit there was lots I still thought I knew (but was probably wrong about). I followed the leads and accepted help of people who knew more than I did and hoped they didn't remember me as the chick who crashed and burned five years ago. And afterwards, I promised them, and myself, that I'd be back and try again.