When my son was first born, I actually spent some time doing that thing that we stay-at-home moms supposedly spend our lazy, bon-bon eating days doing: I watched television. Now, I know, folks who haven't actually been stay-at-home parents to a colicky infant -- whose poor little nervous system hated the bright, loud world outside the womb -- have this image of what it means to stay at home and watch TV all day: comfortably clad in pajamas, with feet up and snacks and cool drinks within easy reach, the idle mom flicks through television channels weighing the merits of Oprah vs. Ellen, a rosy baby sleeping peacefully in a bassinet somewhere. So for those folks, let me set you straight right now. That ain't how it goes. And believe me, I wanted that to be how it goes. Why do you think I signed up for this whole Mama gig in the first place?

Those days I spent watching TV have this blurry, disjointed dream quality in my memory. Were there multiple days? Or was it all one long day? I think it's really all a single day, months long, in which I'm never really awake but also never fully asleep...

I doze for an hour here and there and then gaze out at the world through glazed, foggy eyes for a few hours before nodding off again. I'm some weird, ironically life-giving combination of a vampire and those red eyed soldiers in the movies who've been subjected to some experiment that takes away their need to sleep in order to create the perfect killing machine. The curtains are always drawn whether from migraines or because I'm nursing. The baby only consistently stops his piercing screams when I'm nursing, so I'm almost always nursing. Some days I just don't bother to put on a shirt at all; I walk around in huge, industrial nursing bras leaking milk like a giant cow.

When I put him in the bassinet, he screams like he's on fire. I haven't showered in days. I'm too exhausted to get anything to eat or drink, and besides, if I move, the baby will wake up and scream. It's like sitting with a live grenade on my lap. I haven't slept more than two hours at a stretch in weeks, maybe months. The TV is my constant companion, full of adult human voices that distract me without demanding any mental energy. I long for the day when I can stop watching reruns of Law and Order (every last incarnation of it) and what? Grocery shop? Vacuum? Do dishes? It's all a treat. Really.

Now that the kids are older, I rarely watch TV. When they are around and awake, I don't want to watch the kind of awful crime dramas I like to watch. And when they are asleep or off at school, I have, well, all those years of things to do that didn't get done when the kids were smaller. Just the other day I was cleaning out my closet and found half-written thank you notes for baby gifts. My son is eight now, people, and my daughter is five. I'm a little behind. But I would like to live out that fantasy of just kicking back and watching TV. I don't know. Maybe today. While I'm folding laundry. And finishing those thank you notes.

There's a picture of me somewhere, when my son was a few months old, sitting at the computer and uploading pictures of him to share. I got lots of advice to sleep when the baby slept. I was told by plenty of people that those early sleepless days of parenthood are temporary, that things settle down eventually and I would sleep again. When that shift happened, I would have time for those things I ought to put off in favor of sleep now. That all made sense to me, yet I look at that picture and think about how isolated I felt and how desperately I wanted to do something that wasn't caring for an infant or sleeping, in spite of my utter, mind-numbing exhaustion. I was shocked at how completely my life, and even my body, was not my own anymore and I was determined to wrench some part of my time back to me, even at the cost of much needed rest.

I can't always see what self-care looks like. Was it good self care to push through sleep deprivation to do something that was fun for me and helped me reach out of my isolation to connect with loved ones? Or was it bad self care to add to the exhaustion that exacerbated my postpartum depression and contributed to near daily migraines?

It's something I struggle with to this day. I've had a tough week, full of difficult situations and painful emotions. And I've had to ask myself: is it good self care to skip exercise and meditation in favor of sleep or to skip sleep in favor of exercise and meditation? It's certainly not good self care to down several sugary, caffeinated Cokes and handfuls of cookies in order to stay awake. But it's also not good self care to snap at my kids and my husband because I haven't been able to carve out a quiet moment to myself to connect with my higher power and unwind.

The best I can do is feel my way through, because while I don't always know what self care looks like, I do know what it feels like, and I know, based on how I feel now, that whatever I have been doing, hasn't been quite the kind of self care I need right now.

Early in recovery, I struggled with the notion that the geographic cure -- trying to fix my life with a move to a new home, a new job or a new relationship -- is a fallacy. I know that I bring my problems with me wherever I go, lugging them around like so much unseen baggage, and yet... There's a reason why I've been tempted run away from my marriage at times -- to shave my head and join a cult or live in a shack in Montana or just head to the beach and elope with a cabana boy -- it's worked for me before!

When I left an emotionally abusive past relationship, guess what? I felt happier. When I moved out of a city where the cost of living was so high that I had to share a moldy basement apartment with someone I didn't get along with, guess what? I felt happier. When I quit the job with the insane, controlling boss and found something new, guess what? I felt happier.

Sometimes, I felt better immediately: lighter and more carefree from the instant I turned in my resignation letter. And sometimes, like in the case of leaving an abusive relationship, it felt like a fog was slowly lifting, like coming out of my post-partum depression, when I had been feeling so bad for so long that I'd forgotten who I was and what feeling good felt like. The problem was, I thought feeling better meant that all that invisible baggage had somehow been lost in transit and left behind me forever. So, when things got bad again, I'd do what worked in the past: up and leave. At one point I was so unhappy in my career that I was changing jobs nearly every year, sometimes several times a year. And each time it was a relief, but only temporarily. It was never long before dissatisfaction was eating at me again.

So, when I found out about my husband's addiction, my first impulse was to run, fast and far. I'd find some new place, some new person, some new life where this wouldn't hurt. I didn't. I stayed. And it's been a surprise to me to find that, in working on myself, the pain has started to go away for the first time without running. I've started to see that if I had run, I might have felt better for a time, but that invisible baggage would have dragged me right back into the arms of another addict and through the same painful cycle again, just as my own dissatisfaction with myself would eventually make every place, every job, every person tiresome once the newness wore off.

Making a change in external circumstances — leaving an abusive relationship, changing to a career better suited to my interests, moving out of a dismal, expensive apartment — has its place. Recovery has certainly helped me cut old, unhealthy ties and build new ones. It has helped me reinvent and re-envision my career. It has helped me rethink the physical space I live in. Sometimes those geographic changes are exactly the right thing to do, but the changes by themselves aren't a cure; the movement has to be the result of my recovery program, not a substitute for the program itself.

Now, I may not be one for much crying, but I did cry (I'll admit it, I did) the first time (ok, ok! few times) I watched Finding Nemo. Even before I lost track of my son a few times, I related so much to the anxiety, the overwhelming desire to keep one's child safe from harm, that Marlin (a.k.a. Nemo's dad -- see, I've watched the movie enough that Marlin and I are on a first name basis) felt.

In one of the DVD features about the making of the film (oh, yeah -- I read instruction manuals too), one of the writers said he is often asked why Nemo has one gimpy fin. He said that they were going to make Nemo learning to swim with this disability a bigger part of the plot line, but even though they didn't, they left the gimpy fin in. Why? Because it symbolized that weakness or that difference in your child that every parent worries about. It's different for every parent and every child, but there's always a worry there.

Jay's great fear centers on adoption; she worries that her daughter feels the pain of that first loss in each subsequent loss and fears being abandoned. And Jay was right when she said that my fear centers on autism, although it's been there for far longer than I have been able to apply the word autism to my son's differences.

When my son was an infant, he would scream these painful, horrific screams. In those screams, from the very day he was born, I always heard him saying, "Mama, please, please help me. I'm scared and I'm hurting and I need you." They were screams like he was being tortured, but when I held him and nursed him, he'd calm down. He seemed so much more vulnerable, so much more helpless and so much more susceptible to fear and pain than other children.

In my postpartum state (in what I now recognize as the extreme anxiety of postpartum depression), I used to have daily panic attacks, daily waking nightmares. I would think about taking him out for a car ride, and I would slip into a vivid picture of us crashing. And the very worst thing that would happen would not be that he would die, but that I would be killed or pinned somewhere unable to reach him. I knew he'd be screaming those screams of pain and terror that I heard every day. And my absolute worst, gut wrenching fear was that there would be no one there to soothe him or help him, because he couldn't help himself and I was the only one who knew how to help. I worried that without my breast, he'd stop eating. I worried that he would live the rest of his life in pain and terror.

I understand those cries better now. I know that his senses don't take the world in the way other people's do, and that everyday events can overwhelm him to the point of pain. I know that he needs everything in his life to fit within the rigid pattern he's defined, not just in order to feel comfortable, but in order to survive.

After Hurricane Katrina, I had some of the same panic attacks. We don't live in the path of that storm, but I saw what it did and wondered what happened to children like my son. I pictured what would happen if some disaster struck us. My son only eats three things, each of which have to be prepared and served in extremely specific ways. If I can't get his special foods, an emergency ration bar isn't going to cut it. He's going to starve. And I would picture him starving, screaming, writhing, with food available, food he was unable to eat. And I pictured myself stuck and helpless to get him what he needed.

Or much, much worse, I pictured him without us, unable to help himself. Or even in the care of strangers. After all, he can't communicate with them. Yes, my son can talk -- technically, his verbal abilities are within a normal range for his age, which is just fabulous -- but that doesn't mean he can communicate.

For example, he likes spaghetti, but he doesn't call it spaghetti. He calls it spinach. Why? Because Popeye likes spinach and he went through a phase of being obsessed with Popeye. Imagine he's suddenly in your care now, with no instructions on how to help him and no idea how to speak his language. He grunts. He cries. He hasn't eaten anything all day. He pushes away everything you offer and screams at you. If you're lucky, he'll get desperate and tells you he wants spinach. You bring him spinach and he looks at it in horror and screams, "No! That's not spinach!" Now, if he's lucky, you're a nice, caring person with transportation to a working hospital, where he'll have to be sedated or strapped down due to his fear of needles and then force fed through a tube. If you're someone with bad intentions or without access to medical care, there continues my nightmare...

In the days since losing him, I've found that I've had a few flashes of these vivid paralyzing fears again. The fear that he will be alone, scared, unable to care for himself and unable to communicate who he is or what he needs to anyone else. The fear that without me or his father or the rest of his close family, he won't survive, or he'll live in pain and terror. I know that I'm taking all the practical steps that I can to protect and prepare him (from ID bracelets and a stock of almond butter to working with him on what to do and say in emergencies), but practical measures take time and aren't foolproof, and fears aren't always rational. That same vulnerability, helplessness and extreme susceptibility to fear and pain that I saw in him as an infant, I still see in him as a first grader. And that's the gimpy fin that spins this particular mama into worry over this particular child.

That first year of my son's life is something we each seem to have merely survived. For all the love we had for each other and that baby boy, we existed in our separate dark places that year. Although Mark made a silent promise on the day of our baby boy's birth that all the intrigue, flirting and cheating would end, without the tools of recovery, each new stress was driving him to the only means of coping he knew: sex. And I was wrapped in a boa constrictor of anxiety that would squeeze tighter with each movement, crushing me with migraines and chest pains that would wake me in the middle of the night.

As the months crept on, I'd find that when I woke, from anxiety or the baby, it would be to an empty bed with Mark on the computer in the other room. I'd doze and wake every hour, only to find Mark still gone. It would be two or three in the morning before he would come to bed, and he'd be up again at five for work. I'd hear him in the shower, muttering and cursing to himself, as if he were talking in his sleep. I'd lie in bed, straining to listen, thinking those words held the answer to his secret.

What secret? I really couldn't tell. None of it made any sense. When I tried to talk about what he was doing on the computer or ask why he was talking to himself, I hit that soft barrier again: I was fighting to swim through sand, with only the illusion of mobility. I knew he was looking at pornography on the computer (whether because he told me or because I sensed it I don't recall any longer), but I couldn't understand why that should be a secret, nor why it would be reason enough to lose hours of already scarce and precious sleep. Why hide porn? I'd never had a problem with it: I viewed porn individually (as did he) and we'd view it as a couple. And why stay up for hours viewing porn night after night? I was there: a real live available partner. And sleep was there with me.

Something was wrong, really wrong. Something was being hidden from me, and I had to see that something. If Mark wouldn't pull aside the curtain, I decided I would rip it down. I sat down one day at our iMac (grandchild of our first computer, Abby) and installed software that would track each keystroke. Then in the morning, when Mark left for work after a night on the computer, I sat down to trace his footsteps.

I found he had an e-mail account I didn't know about (one of several, it turned out). I found that he had been frequenting a pornographic web site that allowed users to pay for access to adult chat rooms and pay still more for private video chats. I found that he had spent hundreds of dollars in a matter of days paying a woman to masturbate for him on camera and that he had been e-mailing her privately as well. I found that he had been attempting to set up our web cam to send video of himself back to her, but had been unable to overcome some technical difficulties.

I thought briefly about waiting until he got home from work to talk to him, but I knew I couldn't make it through the day with the blood pounding in my ears and my stomach churning in rage and pain and confusion. I picked up the phone with shaking hands and called him on his cell phone on his way to work. He heard the tremors in my voice, turned the car around and rushed back home.

The question I spat out over and over in my fury and bewilderment was, "What were you thinking? Why? Why? Why?" His answer, which seemed crazy, but which was delivered with utter sincerity was, "I didn't know I was doing anything wrong." I could see genuine bewilderment in his face. He didn't see the difference between his actions (which hurt and infuriated me) and viewing pornography (which he knew I was fine with). He told me that he was so worried about me and how exhausted I was with the baby that he wanted me to get as much rest as possible; he decided to use pornography and be as quiet as he could about it so he wouldn't disturb me. He said he had gotten bored with pictures years ago; they didn't do it for him anymore. So, he moved on to video, but recently that wasn't exciting enough either. He really wanted something more, so he sought out the video chats, which was just live, interactive pornography, right?

He was baffled that I was ok with porn, but not with this, that I considered this infidelity, betrayal, cheating. After all, no actual physical contact had been made. He looked like a soap opera amnesiac struggling to remember his true identity: furrowing his brow and saying, "Well, if you say I'm Dirk and I'm a surgeon, I think I might be able to see how that could be true..." There was something he was almost understanding, but not quite. And what he wasn't understanding was so. frightfully. OBVIOUS. It terrified me that he really couldn't see the difference between a Playboy centerfold and a live, online interaction. How could he not grasp the distinction? How could I trust him not to cross some other line in the future, something I understood to be there but he couldn't see?

Still, by the end of the conversation, he'd made it very clear that he was terribly sorry, that he never wanted to hurt me, that he loved and adored me, that he'd learned the difference between right and wrong, and that he was absolutely never going to do this again. He canceled his account with the porn site. He agreed to let me make decisions about the amount of rest and sex I needed instead of making that decision for me. He swore he knew right from wrong now and would never do wrong again. (And he never did do anything on the home computer again.) I was still hurt and uneasy, but we seemed to be back on the right track. Glad we talked about that. Problem solved, right?

Mark and I started our life together in debt and hounded by collection agencies, but these were not of our own making. Both of our fathers did that addicty thing, taking out loans and credit cards in our names. They couldn't take out their own loans or get their own credit cards, their credit ratings were shot. Instead, they ran up debt we didn't know about or told us not to worry, they'd pay us back. And we spent those first years out of college struggling, not only to pay our own student loans, but the debts of our fathers. My first year out of college, I was contacted by a collection agency. They informed me that, unknown to me, I had defaulted on a debt that was the equivalent to nearly half of what I made a year. And let's just say that, 15 years later, Mark still can't get an American Express Card as a result of a scheme of his late father's.

When we first moved in together, I took care of the finances for both of us. Eating pasta for every meal, balancing the checkbook before each grocery store trip and paying interest plus more than the required principal on every debt. We were engaged for several years to give us enough time to save a few thousand dollars to pay for our wedding. It took years, but before our son was born, we were debt free and saving each month.

Then our son was born, and I quit my job. I fell into post-partum depression and couldn't handle the task of keeping track of the finances anymore. Money matters were so stress inducing to contemplate, they'd send me reeling, when I felt I was struggling to survive amid the panic attacks, and the migraines, and the sleep deprivation, and the baby boy who cried day and night, and the dishes, and laundry, and cooking, and home repairs. I tried, good codependent that I am, to control everything, but something had to give: the money, eating, breathing, something...

So, control of the money slipped away from me, and my husband, who was lost in the height of his sex addiction, more concerned about hiding the money he was spending on Internet porn and other women than balancing the checkbook, couldn't step in to help. But we had that savings we built up before my son was born and did ok, even with no one monitoring things. Then I got pregnant (unexpectedly) with my daughter, my son was diagnosed with autism, my husband quit his job and came clean about his addiction and in the space of a few months, my whole world spiraled away from me, finances included. And more than four years later, I'm still reeling from that loss.

We burned through the savings when my husband was out of work and then it seemed like everything required money. There were therapists upon therapists for my husband and my son and sometimes me, and there babysitters so we could see the therapists and each other. I knew the money was slipping away but I couldn't keep on top of it. And whenever I said, "We can't afford it." My husband's response was "we can't afford not to." It seemed we had to spend money or our marriage would fall apart, our son would never eat, our lives would fall apart. And I was just too overwhelmed to fight it.

I tried to hand off the job of paying bills to my husband, but when things didn't get paid, I took over again, but didn't do much better than he did. About a year ago, I told him I couldn't handle what few shreds of the finances I was still clinging to. I just couldn't get on top of things, and I couldn't control his part of the spending. He needed to see for himself where we were. So, I stopped paying the bills, really stopped this time. I told him all of the bills that usually paid automatically from our checking account were not going to be paid unless he went back and activated them himself. And, then, forced to look closely, he finally saw clearly what was happening. As many times as I had said the words, I hadn't been able to make him understand, but he was able to see: tens of thousands of dollars in debt and more money going out than coming in every month. We were living on credit and running out of credit fast.

So, he's going to DA meetings these days and continuing to refine a spending plan and learn how to manage the money. Is our debt a compulsive thing? I personally don't think so. Still, 12 Step is a comforting structure for Mark, and he is learning from people who have been through what we have been through before. And that's the beauty of any 12 Step program: not feeling alone and ashamed anymore, but working with people who understand to improve your life, one day at a time.