In my bedroom, buried in a pile of papers is a questionnaire labeled "The Marriage Expectation Inventory." Each question is answered in neatly printed block letters in purple ink. After nearly a decade and a half, the ink has started to bleed through the pages and on the reverse of each page are the blurry ghosts of letters in a screaming fuchsia.

On the line beneath "What is the greatest weakness you bring to your marriage?" I've printed, "Jealousy/insecurity," which is an interesting answer given what happened in our marriage in the years after I completed the questionnaire. At the time, I wouldn't allow myself to admit that I wasn't comfortable with my husband's behavior toward women, so I thought there must be something wrong with me for being uncomfortable about it. I wasn't worried that he might find himself involved with another woman because, oh, say, he was looking to get involved with other women, but because I was lacking in the confidence necessary to fully believe the fantasy that he wouldn't.

This weekend we were out at the park with our kids when a woman approached us and complimented Janie's curls, a compliment we hear, oh, roughly, once a minute every time Janie walks anywhere outside our home. Janie whispered "thank you" while looking at her toes and then ran off to play. Mark and I sat down on a bench and a few minutes later the same woman came over, sat down next to Mark and began chatting.

The odd thing was, unlike most moms at the park, she didn't chat about her children. She chatted briefly about her own physical attractiveness and her availability for a relationship. Then, a few awkward moments later, she left.

A decade ago, Mark would have had her number at the end of the conversation or would have given her his. She would be one of his new friends, someone to keep in flirtatious contact with and maybe have an affair with. And I would have gone home furiously angry at him and hating her, but most of all mad at myself for being so insecure that I couldn't trust the husband who clearly loved me. I would have tried to keep all that in until it exploded out at Mark. We would have fought about it. He would have assured me he loved me and it was just my jealous mind playing tricks on me.

This time around, I thought of that questionnaire and laughed. That woman's conversation crossed some invisible line of intimacy and it made both Mark and me uncomfortable. I can identify the exact words and the exact moments that brought up those feelings of discomfort for me. I can talk to my husband about it without contemptuously berating him for any part in it. And I can recognize that it's not helpful to dismiss my feelings as the delusions of an insanely jealous or insecure mind. But then again, it never was.

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.

The pages are creased.
Pressed by your own hand, sealed, sent
hand by hand, to me.

And you say please. Please.
Write. Send me something you touched.
E-mail's so sterile.

Memory is notoriously unreliable: we leave out some details and enhance others; we rewrite old understandings based on what we currently know; we simply forget. I've written about most of the incidents in this blog from memory, even those few events I do have written records for, simply because it can be both time consuming to find and read the records and painful to revisit them first hand. However, for the past few weeks, I have been time traveling back through my life -- reading through old diaries and letters -- as I work on my 1st Step.

My old diaries are a treasure trove, but there are still many incidents I left out; much of what I saw of my husband's addiction (although I didn't call it by that name then) at the time I either didn't consider important enough or considered too confusing and painful to record there. Fortunately, starting some fourteen years ago, I began saving copies of the letters I wrote to my best friend, where my sharing is both more mundane and at times more telling than what I shared with myself alone. Last night I found the following letter from October 12, 1996 about two of my husband's acting out partners, as I perceived them at the time. Mark and I were engaged, but not yet married at this point.

The first woman I mention was a coworker Mark dated during our engagement. She was unaware that we were engaged at the time; Mark didn't tell her, instead she found out later, when other people at work congratulated Mark on our engagement in front of her. I was completely unaware anything had gone on between them until Mark told me during disclosure seven years later. The second woman was someone who had gotten Mark's e-mail address either through a mutual friend or a career networking website. They carried on a long-distance flirtation filled with sexual innuendo for a year or so, but never met.

One of the things that stood out at me in reading this was the extent to which I minimized my own feelings and played off any worries as the result of my own unreasonable "jealousy" or "paranoia" or "insecurity." I was also struck by how I was reassured after talking to Mark, who would certainly have told me, not just that nothing was going on, but would have made me feel very loved and attractive. Since I believed at the time that infidelity of any kind (physical or emotional) was absolutely incompatible with love and attraction, the only option open to me if I believed that he loved and was attracted to me was that I must be crazy, since he certainly couldn't be unfaithful under those circumstances.

Another thing that struck me, and still resonates with me, is my rage toward older (in this case Mark and I were close to 30) men who date women of high school and college age. I still am not entirely certain where this rage comes from, and I am continuing to examine it. But I do know that age difference remains a trigger for me, although generally only when teens, or those just barely out of their teens, are involved.

"It's 11:30ish on a Saturday nite & I'm home alone in a weird funk. I figured you'd help me talk myself out of it. I was fighting the urge to tear some stale wine out of the fridge -- but I've decide to fight no longer -- vinegar or not it'll be relaxing...

"Mark's out at a birthday party for one of the administrators in his department -- they're at some jazz club -- I think -- in [city name]. I decided to bag -- an hour there & an hour back plus the $8 cover charge and drink money for some woman I've only met once just didn't seem worth bagging the end of Game 4 of the Yankee/Orioles playoffs. I was sort of bumming about not having Mark around -- he's been out at work all day -- but right now if this wine were just a little bit better life would be perfect.

"I was kind of bent out of shape earlier b/c I was cleaning up & was moving a pile of Mark's papers from the living room floor to the top of his dresser when I saw a letter -- actually just the envelope -- from this "penpal" of his at [college name] addressed to him at work rather than here at home. So I -- having a jealous streak about a mile wide -- started fretting over it. His correspondence with this woman has always made me sort of paranoid. He's never met her -- they met thru e-mail -- but they write all the time. I guess it's reasonable that he gave her his work address -- since he doesn't really know her but... I guess she hits a sore spot with me -- touches on all my insecurities. She's an undergrad -- which makes her much younger than us -- but that only fuels my insecurities. Just before Mark & I started dating he was dating this woman who was a senior in H.S. -- he was finished with college at the time. That is something that has always made me angry beyond the point of reason -- men who date younger women. I have no idea why -- but it disgusts me more than anything else in the world -- I find men who date younger women to be the most reprehensible scum...

"I feel like I'm in an episode of Laverne & Shirley -- with those words Mark entered the room. Guess I'll get back to this later -- shame really -- I was just feeling better...

"October 13, 1996... Mark & I had a nice talk last night about my many jealous paranoid delusions -- and now everything is fine. I go thru these things every four-five months or so -- and talking to Mark always makes it all seem so ridiculous that I feel better right away. I guess I just get scared sometimes -- I start imagining what it would feel like if something happened -- if I did lose Mark -- and I start going over every little thing -- making sure it's all ok -- and if I come across anything I'm not sure about I freak out. I suppose that's nothing new -- my love for Mark has always been (this sounds so cheesy but...) so powerful that it terrifies me. (That really is so melodramatic I'm tempted to cross it out...)"

Likewise, although these excerpts still raise some shame, and I'm tempted to delete them rather than share the person I used to be, I will let them stand.

"Whoa!  How did he do that?!" my kids exclaimed as the magician we were watching lifted a cup to reveal that a small red rubber ball had been magically transformed into a bright yellow tennis ball.

My son Austen thought a moment and then exclaimed, "I know how he did it!"

"Uh, oh," I thought, "Austen is about to commit the ultimate magic faux pas and reveal the way the magician does his trick."  After all, I'd seen the magician's hand go to his pocket some time back and while his hands were so extremely deft and quick that I hadn't actually been able to see the transfer of balls, I knew it had happened.

I'd learned to watch magicians carefully as a child after painstakingly saving my allowance money to buy a magic kit that claimed to transform pennies into dollars.  At the time, it seemed like a wise and excellent investment.  With this kit, I'd be able to transform future allowance earnings into one hundred times their original worth with a flick of my hand over this magic black box.  I'd be able to buy whatever I wanted.  I'd be set for life.

What a disappointment to find that the kit contained a box with a trick compartment.  Insert a dollar into the false back of the box, put a penny in the front, close the box and reopen the trick compartment to reveal the hidden dollar.  Ta da!  As magician Doug Henning used to say, "Magic is illusion!"

But it turned out Austen hadn't seen illusion yet, only magic.  "It was his magic wand!" he blurted out, "That's how he did it!"  And as he said it, I felt an odd mixture of tenderness and disappointment.  His world view wasn't sophisticated enough yet to recognize that there were other possibilities, and there was something adorable and poignant and heartbreaking in that all at once.

I went for a checkup recently, and as I waited for the doctor, I read some of the brochures in the office about heart disease, diabetes, cancer... And found that in nearly every brochure, one of the symptoms listed for cancer was "no symptoms or vague symptoms."

I have two friends who have been diagnosed with Stage 4 colon cancer. They have sent out their stories along with lists of warning signs: things they now see clearly, things they think they should have caught, little things that now loom big, the vague symptoms that came only near the time they were diagnosed. And it's easy for me to look at those lists and think, "Oh, I would definitely have gotten that checked out right away. It seems really obvious there was something wrong." Yep, I'd be safe from cancer. I'd notice.

Of course, when I weave together the story of my life with my husband, the hidden addiction seems obvious: like a single red thread winding its way through white cloth. Just as it is for my friends who have cancer, it's easy to see things in retrospect, to look over that list of warning signs of infidelity or sex addiction in a trashy magazine and say, "Yes, that was there and that was too." It's easy to feel foolish, to think the pattern was there, perfectly visible, for anyone to see. It's easy to believe that I know what to look for even now. But it's the narrative that makes it appear that way.

It's impossible to truly tell my story the way I saw it at the time. In a single day, there are 24 hours; there are 1440 minutes; there are 86,400 seconds. In a year there are nearly 9 thousand hours; there are over half a million minutes; and there are over 31 million seconds. In the period of a little over nine years that my husband and I lived together — sharing the same house, the same phone, the same computer, the same bank account, the same credit cards — there were over 3 thousand days; around 80 thousand hours; nearly 5 million minutes; nearly 300 million seconds.  And that's not even getting to the years we knew each other, loved each other, were intimate with each other before we lived together.

Days, weeks, months, sometimes even years, would go by without any indication that anything was wrong. Then there would be silence again, before another little blip on the radar.  I thought the pattern was what happened most often; it took a long time to see that the breaks in the pattern were themselves a pattern, although now, when I write, when I remember, it seems obvious.  I condense the story down, I write out the old pattern, the one that seemed predominant, because I can't remember every single one of those intervening ordinary moments, and certainly no one would want to read them even if I could.

They'd be a very long version of something like this: Mark woke up and kissed me. He showered, humming happily, while I lay in bed listening to the water run before I got up.  He got dressed. I got dressed. We said we loved each other. We chatted about the day ahead. We went to work. He walked out the door for work at exactly the same time every day. A minute later he walked back in the door because he'd forgotten his wallet or his keys or some paper he needed. We called each other during the day just to say "hi" or "I love you" or "I'm on my way home now." He'd come home on time every day, and he'd always call me before he left work to ask what we were doing for dinner or if he should pick anything up from the store on the way home or if I would. We'd have dinner. We'd chat about our day and our work and our coworkers. We'd watch TV. We'd laugh. We'd kiss. We'd say, "I love you." We'd go to bed, together.

Repeat every day for hundreds of days.

He'd be a few hours late for just one day.  One day.  Out of thousands.

Weeks would go by.

He'd stay up late on the computer one night and then it would be back to our normal pattern.  A few hours.  Out of tens of thousands.

A month would go by.

He'd mention a new friend.  A few seconds.  Out of hundreds of millions of seconds.

Several more months would go by.

He'd call her.  A few minutes.  Out of millions of minutes.

Years would go by. During which I'd never hear about the friend again.

He'd stay up late on the computer for a few nights.  Another small blip in the thousands of nights we'd spent together where he wasn't on the computer.

Hundreds more days would go by...

Just as cancer in its later stages produces more (and more severe) symptoms, when Mark's addiction escalated, the time between incidents shortened and the pattern became more evident.  But when he disclosed the full extent of his actions during addiction, there truly were encounters (particularly early on) that I knew nothing about and would never have known about or suspected if he hadn't told me.  There were no odd receipts, no phone calls, no travel, no late nights at work, no strange withdrawals from the bank account, no unusual smells or actions.  They were one time incidents that happened while I was out of town on business or he was out of town on business or I was working (or working late). There was no way to feel those first few cancer cells growing.  There was no way to feel the impact of a tumor smaller than a pin's head.  The aberration wasn't big enough to be recognized yet.

And I realized that I can't be safe from cancer or sex addiction or anything else, even if I know the warning signs.  Sometimes there simply are no symptoms or only vague symptoms.  Until the end.

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...

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?