A few days ago, a columnist I generally like wrote a satirical piece on sex addiction rehab (one I won't link to here, due to its triggering nature). He's a liberal columnist, so the comments were populated with lots of LOLs and virtual eye rolling at the concept of sex addiction as a creation of the religious right: people who are uptight about and don't know how to enjoy sex. There was lots of mocking of the "higher power" concept, lots of atheists sneering at the superstitious nonsense that is God.

Of course, the conservative flip side of the "sex addiction is a joke" coin is to sneer at therapists: people who are forever trying to write off weakness and lack of willpower as "diseases" in order to bilk people out of money.  Either way, treatment for sex addiction is seen as misguided and useless: so called "sex addicts" either "just" need to loosen up and learn to accept and enjoy their sexuality or "just" need to have more willpower and moral fortitude.

And either way, as someone married to a sex addict, it can be both hurtful and maddening to feel the world is ringed around us in a circle, pointing and laughing, saying that we've been duped when, for the first time, we feel we're seeing clearly. It's one of those things that is likely to draw me back into that crazy place I used to occupy: where, like a six-year-old, I yell "NO!" at someone else's "Yes!" only to have them yell "Yes!" back at me in an endless cycle; where I feel panicked and crazy, as if someone's telling me the sky is red when I see it's blue; where I spend my time and energy fruitlessly trying to convince someone else that they're wrong so that I can feel right again.

I wanted (desperately) to pull out my credentials and yell into the comments section, "Mark and I weren't some crazy, uptight religious fanatics who just couldn't embrace our sexuality!  And I'm not some uptight, frigid wife who can't please her man!  I was a really good atheist who really loves sex!"  As if the columnist, or any of the commenters, would read that and suddenly say, "Oh, some random stranger on the Internet says that wasn't her experience. Now I've totally changed my view on sex addiction!" rather than, "I bet she actually sucks in bed and her husband is an asshole."

Deep breath.  Step 1.  I am powerless over other people.  I am powerless to change their perceptions of me.  And trying to do so anyway makes my life unmanageable.  Followed by Step 2.  Help from that much maligned higher power.

I didn't leave the comment.  I stopped reading, made the column disappear in a flash of electrons with the click of my mouse and I did something I never used to do before.  I prayed.  "God, let me see the world through your eyes.  Let me not be threatened by people whose experiences are different.  When I mock others, I am usually scared and hurting.  In every place that this columnist and his readers are scared and hurting too, open their hearts to love and peace.  Help me on my journey, and help all of them follow the path they need to, so that we can find love and understanding for each other."

In the past, I wouldn't have prayed because my God is not a separate being who controls the world, but I've found that prayer isn't (as I used to think) some useless, crazy, superstitious ritual predicated on achieving results with the help of a supernatural power.  Prayer is a tool I use to ground myself, open my own heart and let go of my own pain, fear and anger.  Prayer is a way of connecting to my higher power, my better nature, my Buddha nature, the God part inside me.  Prayer is a way of feeling love and compassion and connection to others, rather than distance and anger and fear and resentment.  When I pray for someone who requests my prayers, it connects us, and lifts us both up.  When I pray (quietly, secretly) for someone who doesn't request it, it helps me love and forgive.  I've learned that even if prayer never produces any tangible results in the world, it's not useless -- not to me -- because the purpose isn't to change the world to get what I want, it's to help me be in line with and at peace with what is.

So, I found out last week (much to my disappointment) that I am not the Ultimate Ruler of the Universe. In fact, I'm not even a competent Ultimate Ruler of Me. Maybe some of you knew that already. Actually, I knew that already, but I always forget. You see, I make these grand proclamations like "I am going to get enough sleep this week!" expecting the universe is just going to fall in line and let me do that and that I am going to be able to use my willpower to change deeply ingrained habits. And, go figure, everything and everybody does what they're going to do, which (oddly) doesn't include bending to my will.

Last week, I announced (to myself, my family and my little corner of the blogosphere) that I would be starting The Week of Sleep to kick of my Year of Health. I was going to be in bed by 10 p.m. each night, and I was going to get a solid eight hours of sleep a night for a change. And with all of that sleep, I was going to be able to eat better, exercise more and (as an added bonus not related to the Year of Health) keep my house neat and tidy like never before. And for a few nights, I was actually doing pretty well; I got that sleep and was feeling hopeful about the week to come.

Then my husband got sick. And my daughter got sick. And he was coughing all night. And she was unable to fall asleep because her head hurt and her tummy hurt and her eyes hurt and her jaw hurt and her nose hurt. And she was unable to stay asleep because her nose was runny and she was coughing and she needed water and she needed medicine and did she have a fever? no, but she was still too hot and then too cold and then just not comfortable. So I didn't get all that awesome sleep for several nights.

But then, when everyone started feeling better, I still didn't get the sleep I needed. Because at the end of it all, I just threw my hands up and said, "Fine! If that's the way it's going to be, if the universe is not going to collude in my quest for sleep, then I'm not going to either!" So, the past two nights, when I could well have gone to bed by, maybe not 10 p.m. but at least 10:30 p.m., I've been up until close to (or well after) midnight. As usual.

So, at what should have been the end of The Week of Sleep, I haven't slept. In fact, I. am. totally. exhausted. But even through my bleary, sleep deprived eyes, I can see that I neither accepted the things I could not change nor had the courage to change the things I can. It's time to start over this week with a new attitude, in which I'm not the big boss of the nighttime world, knowing I have an added reason to pray at bedtime.

Earlier this year, I read an article about technology that would allow us to record and store every moment of our lives. Imagine: our whole lives stored in a single searchable archive. We could settle those arguments with the boss by replaying what was actually said. ("See, you did tell me you wanted this by Thursday, not Tuesday!") We could go back to that first kiss over and over again. In fact, if I were recording my whole life, I'd even be able to figure out where the heck I read this elusive article (The New York Times, maybe?) and link to it.

Maybe it's the year (and the first decade of the 21st century) drawing to a close, but the idea of a life archive was on my mind the other night.  My memory is flawed — as memories are —and ever since I was a child, I have wanted the ability to go back and reconstruct the past if I need to.  It's one of the reasons I write so much: not just here on my blog, which is a relatively recent occurrence, but in the thirty plus years of journals I have stacked up in my closet and in the copies of letters I have in file drawers (yes, years ago, back in the days when people did things like write letters on paper and send them to people in the mail, I started fastidiously making and keeping copies of my outgoing correspondence) and in the e-mail archive I have dating all the way back to the early 90's.  And I'm not just an obsessive chronicler, as Mark can attest from the paper laden state of our bedroom/office, I keep nearly every scrap of information that passes through my hands: from calendars to holiday letters to post-it notes.  And it's still never been enough.

My craving for a complete record of every moment of my life reached a height when I discovered Mark's sex addiction.  I went back over what I had and found it scandalously lacking.  How could I not have written anything at all on what turned out to be several major dates of acting out?  How could I not have a copy of some of those suspicious receipts that caused me so much angst?  And how could Mark have deleted all the e-mail in the secret accounts he used for contacting other women, so that, when at last I discovered them, I would have no way to verify dates and times?

I wanted to weigh every word he had written to someone else.  I wanted to compare each date and time to other events in our lives so I could thoroughly revise our history together based on what I now knew to be the truth.  I wanted to go back to each instance of his acting out and see what I had missed.  Did he look different when he came home after having sex with someone else?  Was there some way I could have known?  Now that I had all the information about what was happening at the time, would our lives together look different to me?  I wanted to go back to those sections and play them over and over again, like a detective in a crime drama, ready to pause it and say, "There!  See that!  The way he raises his eyebrow right there.  That's the tell."

I believed that somewhere out there was some objective reality that I'd failed to completely capture, and if I just knew how to access that, if had a more complete picture, if had more information, everything would be different; I'd be safe.  I would have something to point to in my self doubt and say, "I'm not crazy!  There was something there, something wrong, I just didn't know how to look for it."  I believed the whole truth was knowable by me if I just tried hard enough, if I had all the pieces to the puzzle.

What I didn't realize at the time was that the information alone was not enough.  The security of some objective truth is an illusion.  I still need the ability to interpret what I know and the confidence to believe in my own interpretation, my own truth, in the face, not of contradictory facts, but of contradictory interpretations.  There were times I did have evidence of my husband's addictive behavior, but I didn't have the ability to understand it or the confidence to hold to my feelings in the face of contradictory spin from Mark.  If I could play back the movie of my life, it wouldn't appear the same to me now as it did then or as it will in ten years or twenty years, not because of new information, but because of new experiences.

Still, I'm pretty sure that, given the chance, I'd totally buy something that would record my life.  After all, the fact that I still don't know where I read about all this in the first place is going to bug me for at least the rest of this year.  And wouldn't it be nice to just look that up rather than do all this tiresome letting go?  Maybe if I check my e-mail...

"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.

Years ago, I read The Dilbert Future by Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert comic strip, and was especially fascinated by his use of affirmations to focus on his goals and achieve success. I even tried the technique myself and found the process of spending some time each day affirming, in writing, some measurable, long-term goal was helpful.  But I didn't want to stop at writing affirmations about things like finding a new job or exercising more.  What I really (secretly) liked about the idea of affirmations was the notion that it might be possible to use them to somehow control the world around me.

Maybe I could write something like "The Yankees will win the 2009 World Series" fifteen times a day and magically cause it to happen.  I'd tried praying in the 1981 World Series (with obvious disastrous results) and had give up on both God and prayer in one swoop.  Affirmations were like prayer, only atheist friendly.  I wanted the world to do my will, and if wheedling a deity into using its omnipotence on my behalf didn't work, maybe I needed to cut out the middle man and magically control the world myself.

Today, I found myself thinking about writing affirmations.  Only I wasn't thinking of using them around my personal goals; I found myself idly considering using them to try to control the outcome of a lottery that will determine whether or not my daughter gets to participate in an activity she's interested in.  It's something I don't have any control over, but desperately wish I did have control over.  When I realized what I was considering, I thought of what I so often need to remind myself: God's will, not my will; I pray only for the knowledge of God's will for me and the power to carry it out.

Damn.  Caught at that same old thinking again.  I felt a momentary release as I started to let go and trust that everything would work out for the best, even if it didn't work out my way, and then in one last desperate attempt, I thought, "Still, maybe I could try just a little, this one time.  I'm sure just a little control of the universe this time wouldn't be a problem, would it?  And I won't try it again.  After this, it will be God's will all the way."  As if I could stop at just one.

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.

Last Monday I walked through the grocery store feeling like a weight was crushing my chest, a tight lump in my throat the only thing between me and tears. And part of me wanted to self-indulgently sit there on the linoleum floor under the flicker fluorescent lights and cry, much the same way that I'll both fear and crave the relief of vomiting during a wave of nausea. For the second time this year, a babysitter had dumped us because she found my son Austen's autistic behavior too difficult to handle.

The grocery store I was in wasn't the one closest to my home. It was an additional twenty minutes further away, because the one closest to my house was all out of strawberry Yoplait, one of the three foods Austen will eat (and not just eat reliably, but eat at all). I'd had a clerk check the stockroom and then check with the store in the next town before making the drive to the store in which I now clutched my cart wanting to cry.

It had been the sitter's first attempt at watching the kids, and I'd been satisfied that everything went just fine.  She had experience working with autistic children in the past, and both children seemed to take to her from the start.  There seemed to have been a few rough patches, but it didn't strike me that the kids or the sitter had a particularly difficult night and the sitter, even at the end of the evening, seemed interested in learning more about how to work with Austen.  But this morning I'd been informed that she did not want to come back because the job was too difficult.

Too difficult?  Is that what my life is?  Here I was having driven an extra twenty minutes each way to the grocery store because my son's eating issues are so severe, and I have a babysitter who has worked with autistic children before seeming to say to me (through her actions) that my son is worse than any of them.  Am I in another one of those situations, like living with an addict, where we start to think that everyone secretly drives raging drunk or tries to pick up prostitutes or does drugs with their kids because that's all we see, where the bizarre and unacceptable become normal?

I remembered the babysitter asking about whether Austen's behavior was better at school than at home and wondering, "Was she saying it was my fault?  Did she think if I'd worked harder, if I were smarter, if I were more skilled, if I set up a different structure, if I were stricter, if I trained him better, everything would be different?  (I'll work harder, I'll do better, please love me!)  Does she think I'm a bad mom?  But the beloved sitter she was replacing used to tell me what great work I was doing and how blessed our family was..."

And I actually started to tally the sitters up: "Two quit this year, but three started and love us.  One stayed on from last year (the one who had just moved, whose eyes would glow with enthusiasm when she talked about our family) and in past years no one had ever quit; they got pregnant or moved or started school... But maybe things are getting worse?  Oh, this isn't helping!  Am I in denial?  Is my life crazy or just life?  Am I bad or am I good or am I... (damn!) looking to other people to tell me what is real and whether I'm doing the right thing for my son."

It didn't help that tightness in my chest or that longing for tears to dissipate to know that I was looking to other people (rather than myself and my God) for definition and approval.  I still desperately wanted to know what I couldn't know: that I was doing the "right" things, that my son would be ok in the way I (not God) wanted him to be ok, that he'd be able to get along in the world on his own someday.  But it did help me to see that, wherever I am on my journey as a parent, the answer is not going to come from taking a tally of what babysitters think of my family, but in feeling confident in myself and my higher power.

I shared in a meeting recently about my fear around my husband's business trips and how that fear is a reminder to me to connect with my Higher Power. After the meeting a newcomer asked me what I'm going to do now: I mean, he's going on a business trip soon, right? So what do you do now? Check his phone records? How can you make sure he's not acting out in his addiction?

Of course, I had already said what I was going to do: recognize, accept and take responsibility for my own emotions, pray and meditate, work my program, let go. However, as I watched this woman's brow cloud with genuine befuddlement as I repeated this, I remembered how hopelessly inadequate that answer seemed to me in the frantic struggle of those early days. There I was, standing in the wreckage of the-life-I-thought-I-had thinking, "What the hell just happened? And how am I going to rebuild this?" And the "answer" didn't even register as a solution at all. I'd think, "Ok, ok, I know you said something about some useless, flaky spiritual stuff and keep coming back. Blah blah blah. But what do I DO?"

It was as if my home had just been leveled by a natural disaster. Pray? Sit around meditating? That's not any kind of an answer at all. What was that going to do? I knew what I needed to feel better again; I needed my house back or rather a better house, one that wouldn't fall down again. I couldn't envision a world where my happiness was not dependent on that house. And to get that house back, I had to do something: get on the phone with the insurance company, get the Red Cross and the National Guards in, interview contractors, analyze where the structure had failed and build reinforcements to ensure this could never happen again. All the spiritual mumbo jumbo in the world wasn't going to help with that, and there wasn't any God out there who was going to make a new house magically appear with the wave of an invisible hand.

Likewise, when I first started recovery, I simply couldn't yet envision a world in which the answer to my problems didn't involve having an husband who never acted out again. As long as I could make sure he would never act out in his addiction again, everything would be ok, right? And I could achieve that by somehow doing things the "right" way. In pre-recovery that meant being sexy and passionate and sweet and smart and just generally amazing and perfect enough to fully satisfy him. And when that didn't work, I moved into early recovery, where it meant somehow learning to do this recovery thing (whatever it was) right enough.

And oh, was it annoying when people told me the answer was God, as if God were the ultimate addict to please. I'd tried that game before, the one where God held the key to my happiness but wouldn't give it to me until I did everything perfectly according to some arbitrary and unspoken set of rules. But God hadn't given up the key any more than any of the other people in my life had. That's what made me lose faith in the first place. And now I was supposed to believe things were going to be different? Ha! Those 12 Steppers were deluded! Give up trying to control my husband and try to control God into controlling him instead? I thought to myself, "No, I think I'll stick with controlling him myself rather than handing that over to some non-existent magical being, thanks."

It took years to see that all the flaky spiritual stuff wasn't about changing the world and the people around me to make it all more comfortable for me; it was learning how to be comfortable in the world as it is. My God wasn't going to rebuild the metaphorical house of my life or make sure it would never fall down again; my God was going to help me let go of the pain of losing the house and be ok whatever happened around it in the future. My God doesn't control the things I can't; my God helps me let go of the need to control them in the first place.

Each week we read the promises of our 12 Step program, and my favorite is: "We will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us." And I realized, when I saw myself reflected in that look of pain and confusion in a newcomer's face, that I didn't used to know what to do when I was filled with fear at Mark's actions, but I do now, even if it doesn't seem much like doing anything at all. When Mark gets on that plane, I'm going to try to stay connected with my Higher Power: not so that he doesn't act out or so that I can find out about it if he does, but so that, whatever he does or doesn't do, I can stay present and centered in my own life.

I fear business trips. But it's not my own business trips I fear — as a mom who left corporate work behind some nine years ago, I don't get those myself anymore — it's my husband's. When Mark was active in his sex addiction, (unbeknownst to me at the time) the trips he took for business were veritable perfect storms for acting out. The simmering brew of loneliness in an unfamiliar city, exhaustion brought on by travel and stress about his work triggered the compulsive behaviors he used to self-medicate. And on top of that, his location (most often a hotel room in a major city) generally provided plentiful opportunities for acting out (from porn to strip clubs to prostitutes).

When Mark started in recovery, he changed jobs and took a position that required no business travel at all. He didn't feel he was ready to travel safely at that point, and I was grateful that I didn't have to add one more post traumatic stress trigger to my life just then. Over the years, as his job has changed, he has occasionally been asked to do business travel. He weighs the merits of each trip and talks to me about the impact on me and on our family; sometimes (especially early on) he has refused to go, but sometimes he takes the trip. And every now and then, when he does, a bit of fear creeps up and wraps itself around me. Ok, ok, sometimes more than a bit. There are times when business trips can really make me crazy.

It so happens that Mark has one of those crazy making business trips coming up in a few weeks, and I've felt that fear tightening its grip around me once again. He'll be flying overseas to visit a wealthy business partner who will be treating them to a tour in his private jet, lavish meals and a stay at a luxurious resort. And when I think of wealth and power and indulgence, my mind flies to an overseas trip years ago, when a wealthy and powerful executive in his company rewarded Mark an his coworkers with a night at a strip club, complete with lap dances for all.

And there, as the past casts its shadow on the future, lies fear. It's a fear that has nothing to do with the present moment, where we are both using all the tools we've amassed in the last six years to communicate our feelings honestly and to maintain our respective states of mental health and sobriety. But as I sit with that fear today, with those tools at my disposal, I'm reminded by its dark presence that I must be out of touch with my Higher Power. When I am present and in touch with my Higher Power, there is no fear. The fear, I realize, is a gift that reminds me what I need to do to be free of fear. It guides me back to contact with my Higher Power and back to my faith that Mark and I both (together or separately) will be ok whatever happens, because it is all part of our journey, our learning, our growth. As feel my Higher Power once again, I'm able to breathe, let my shoulders drop away from my ears and gently release that dark shadow and watch it fade away.

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."