For the past year and a half, I have been a regular contributor at the recovery website The Second Road. I learned today that The Second Road will cease operations this month. The content will remain available but unfortunately the site will not be regularly maintained. I am grateful to The Second Road for introducing me to many wonderful people and allowing me to share my journey more widely than through my blog alone, and tonight I drink a nice sober toast (of sparkling apple cider) to all the folks over there.

While I'm saddened, I'm also excited to spend some time right here, tinkering around behind the scenes, maybe answering some of those (ahem) year-old messages piled up in my inbox and of course, writing.

I had a dream last night that I was in a temple and one wall was a curio cabinet filled with tiny statues. I was in a group of people and as we filed past the cabinet, we were each supposed to choose a figure to serve as our spiritual guide and protector. I choose a figure seated in meditation, carved from purple stone. It sat above a small white label with black type that read: "Ananda." When I left the temple, I found I had forgotten to take the figure with me, and I felt lost, until I remembered that in choosing it, it was with me always. And what do you know? Today turned out to be (like every day) a day of losing and finding, of forgetting and remembering. This old room of mine is still here, open like a flower, and I'm ready for whatever the universe has in store for me next.

My husband Mark, I have to admit it, hates fish. And people fish evangelize him all the time. I used to too, in my pre-vegetarian days, when a trip to the aquarium would make me hungry. The problem, you see, is never that people were different and have different needs and tastes; the problem is that Mark has never had "good" fish. "You've never tried really fresh fish. You haven't tried this fish; it's not a fishy fish. You haven't tasted fish the way I make it. You haven't been eating fish the right way. Try this. You'll like it." But he hasn't. Fish just doesn't work for everybody, but there are lots of other things in the world to eat. In my family, there's no one path to good food.

I've had the same experience with religion. I had bad experiences with Christianity growing up; it's just not a good fit for me. And I've had people evangelize me over the years: "You've never tried my church. It's not like your church. You haven't been to the right kind of church. You don't really understand what Christianity is about. You haven't been approaching it the right way. Try this. You'll like it." But I haven't. Fortunately, there are a lot of other belief sets and practices in the world (from Hinduism to atheism) that allow people to connect to something beyond themselves, and to practice many universally beautiful principles, in a way that does work for them. In my experience, there's no one path to the good and the divine.

And I've been thinking of this recently, as I've encountered a few situations where I want to (or have) 12 Step evangelized. When a book says Al-Anon is bunk as it repackages powerlessness as powerfulness, or when an article says that addicts need to look into the origins of their addiction and claims that it's psychotherapy and not 12 Step that does that, I start saying all of those same things: "You don't get it. You're not approaching it the right way. If you really understood the concepts, you'd see that what you're talking about is already included in 12 Step. Give it a chance. You'll see it does have what you want and need."

But 12 Step doesn't work for everyone, not even me or my husband. It's been a part of our toolkit, but we've used it in conjunction with other therapies and spiritual practices. My husband can recognize that fish has lots of excellent nutrients, but that they just aren't presented in a way that is most palatable to him. I can recognize that Christianity incorporates the principles I hold most dear, yet they aren't presented in a way that works for me. And while I can see that 12 Step has great tools, they aren't presented in a way or in language that works for everyone. Nothing does. There's no one path to recovery. Fortunately, there are lots of different foods and religions and recovery programs that give us all those same basic nutrients — whether they support our physical, spiritual or mental health — in a way that works for each of us as individuals. And for that, I am grateful.

A friend called me last night. She's in the midst of some very messy office politics at work. She thinks her coworkers are being difficult. They think she's being unreasonable. Her boss thinks they're all wrong and they all think the boss is wrong. "Do you think I'm being unreasonable? Am I crazy or are they?" she asked. And I paused, because I've seen a whole lot of crazy at this point in my life and I've gotten a pretty secure grip on two things: the first is what I think is and isn't crazy, and the second (and more important) is that it totally doesn't matter.

She wanted to know the answer to the first part, and if I left out that second part, it was easy enough for me to answer: no, I didn't think she was being unreasonable or crazy in her interactions with her colleagues. I thought she had some pretty healthy boundaries and was sticking to them. But I didn't want to tell her that, because what I think doesn't matter.

I know because I've been in that place before: tallying up the yes and no votes in my favor. Sure, I could tell her she wasn't crazy. But her coworkers friends were busy telling them they weren't crazy either. So, she'd go in to work the next day and say, "My friend Mary says I'm not being unreasonable," and her coworker would say, "Yeah, well, my friend Tom says you are." And then she'd have to ask someone else in order to continue having the balance fall in her favor.

To really feel better, I've found that I have to be ok with where I am, regardless of how the score stands. So, what I really wanted to tell her, more than that she was being reasonable in this particular situation, was that it was reasonable for her to have her own boundaries, regardless of whether or not I (or anyone else) agreed with any given boundary at any given moment. But I found myself unable to articulate that part. Sure, it seems easy now that I have time and a keyboard, but it's a different story when I'm fumbling for words on the phone. And it seemed so hard at the time to put what I wanted to say into a nice neat little sentence, rather than launching into a really long philosophical treatise. So, what I actually said was the ultimately unhelpful external validation thing, "No, you're not crazy."

Then I thought, "But it doesn't matter what I think! Oh, wait. There's a program slogan, 'What other people think of me is none of my business.' That's what I want to say!" That's never been one of my favorite slogans, but it did state the crux of the issue in a nice simple little sentence. Oh. I guess that's why we have slogans in 12 Step. They're pithy and easy to remember.

I've had my share of frustration with slogans. They can feel canned. They can be tiresome. But some of them inspire me. Some I repeat daily. And some, even the ones that aren't my favorites, can come in handy sometimes.

I wavered a little over whether it was more morally wrong to skim the book in the store without buying it (is that the literary equivalent of downloading music without paying?) or to actually buy the book, in essence rewarding the author for his cheesy charlatanism (however entertaining).  After a quick look at the first chapter, I decided it would definitely be more wrong to buy the book.

Like many books of the self-help genre, the first few chapters contain don't actually contain any helpful information, but are instead dedicated to telling you (aaaatttt gggrrreeeaaattt lllleeennngggttthhhh) how much helpful information you will find later in this book if you just keep reading.

This is to discourage people like me from doing what I was doing.  Most people just break down buy the book after skimming the introductory marketing material.  Only the persistent skimmer will stick through those self-promotional first few chapters about how Al-Anon is wrong and you are not powerless and you totally can change people if only you follow the four easy steps laid out in this book, which, trust me, are coming, right after a few more of these chapters about how this book is right on the money.  (And speaking of money...  But I bravely pressed on, both because I was eager to see where I had gone wrong on the whole fixing-my-husband's-sex-addiction thing and because knew this was totally blog fodder.

It turns out that the right thing to do is to gather together people who love the addict and stage an intervention.  You are all, unlike what those suckers in 12 Step tell you, to use lots of "I" language to communicate your message.  (Oh, "I" language is a fundamental part of 12 Step? Well, ok, moving on...) The message you are supposed to communicate is that you really love and are concerned about the addict, so much so that you want this person to enter recovery, which includes 12 Step meetings (in spite of the fact that powerlessness is for suckers).

At this point, by the way, your loved one is supposed say yes, you're supposed to set some very non-12 Step boundaries (damn, that's 12 Step too?), your loved one is supposed to enter rehab and — with continued loving detachment (oh, wait, loving detachment is a 12 Step concept too?) — is fixed forever.  Ta da!  You've effected change!  See how awesome you are!

Of course, there's this little, tiny section, buried somewhere deep in the book about what to do in the (really, very highly unlikely event) that the addict refuses to admit to having a problem and says "no" to recovery or storms out or tells you you're crazy.  (But really, don't worry too much about that, because addicts almost never do that kind of thing.  That's why this section is one 200th of the entire book.  The chances are that small.  But you know, just in case.)  The answer?  Keep trying.  Eventually, one day, if you keep at it, your addict will enter recovery.  Because you are powerful, and you can change people.  Don't give up!  If it's not working, you're probably just not doing it right and should study the book harder.

It's as simple as that.

Or is it? It's probably not entirely fair for me to mock this book for repackaging powerlessness as powerfulness and selling it. After all, it does trick people into reading about some concepts that they might not otherwise be willing to explore. Maybe it's the codependent version of putting a free beer sign on the door of an AA meeting. It's false advertising, but it still gets them through the door.

Last week, I was sitting cross-legged on my plump little black cushion on the floor of the Zendo I visit regularly and listening to a talk about cleaning incense burners.  And as I listened, the very deep and profound thought that came to me was, "I seriously am never going to volunteer to clean incense burners at this place."  It wasn't that the task sounded unpleasant — it didn't — but the volunteers who hadn't done it right, who hadn't been sufficiently thorough in their cleaning, were the subject of the dharma talk.  Yikes!  Wouldn't want to be those guys!

Now the leader of the Zendo... (Or is it master or priest or teacher? I never know, because everyone refers to him as Bob, which sounds odd when trying to put him in context.)  In any case, Bob had built his talk around these slacker volunteers — who remained nameless (but they knew who they were...) — who were occasionally leaving little butt-ends of incense in the burners.

Bob wanted to make the point that we need to put our whole hearts and our full effort into everything we do.  But instead of being inspired, I was thinking, "Damn, that job cleaning the incense burners sounds like way too much pressure.  Not only that, everything sounds like way too much pressure.  I've already tried to put my 'full effort' into everything.  It's what led me to crawl, broken and bleeding, into both the rooms of 12 Step and this damn Zendo.  This is so not a good talk for a recovering perfectionist to hear..."

At the end of the talk, there were questions, and as I struggled to formulate mine, someone else asked it for me.  "I don't understand," one woman said, "This week you tell us to put our full effort into perfectly cleaning the incense burners, but last week you told us this story about a student who thoroughly raked all the leaves in a courtyard, only to have the Zen master throw the leaves back on the ground and make him do it again.  The student raked the leaves perfectly, but was told that was too much effort.  How do we know when we're giving our full effort and when we're doing too much?"

I have a habit, born of years of training as a straight A student, of always trying to answer another student's question before the teacher does.  I give myself extra points if my answer (as scored by an independent panel of judges in my head) is better than the instructor's.  But in this case, all I could think was, "Good question!  Let's see you get out of that one, Bob!"

Bob paused and said, "You stop when it is no longer a gift.  In the story, when the master threw the leaves on the ground, it was because the student asked for the master's approval.  He wanted to be praised for what a good job he did.  So he did the work, not as a gift, but to gain something: to gain the master's approval.  When you seek to gain something, it is not a gift.  And when your work is not a gift, it's time to stop.  That is your full effort, even if the job is not done."

Oh.

Good answer.  Wish someone had told me that about 40 years ago.  Maybe I can learn to clean those incense burners better than I thought I could.

I was reading over some of the words of Martin Luther King Jr. today, and came across some that reminded me very much of something I used to repeat to myself and my husband in the wake of disclosure of his sex addiction: "There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love."  Dr. King was talking about his love for the church when he wrote those words, while I was talking about my love for what (at the time) was my God and my religion — my husband — but they were true all the same.

I used to use that idea — that I was feeling the pain I was because I had loved deeply — to comfort myself.  I'd remind myself that — enraged and saddened and disappointed and hurt as I was — those feelings were all born of a tremendous capacity to love.  That love was a gift.  I held onto that idea in the darkest days and tried to remind myself not to shut myself off from loving for fear of being hurt again.  And it's being able to love that has opened my heart to healing from that hurt.

My husband was imperfect.  The church was imperfect.  Human beings are imperfect.  Their institutions are imperfect.  In loving them we are bound to be hurt and disappointed.  And yet we love them and ourselves and in that we find what is divine in all of us.  And that's what saves us.

My husband Mark cannot take care of himself. Really, the man cannot even keep track of what he likes. I have to do it for him. I present as evidence the last few weeks of grocery shopping.

Last week, Mark was sick, and I (sweet and loving spouse that I am) asked him to make a list of anything special he wanted me to pick up for him during my grocery store run. So, he made a list of comfort foods, saying that if I was in a hurry, he really only wanted some Gatorade because he felt a little dehydrated. Still, I decided I was going to get him every darn thing on the list, because I loved him that much. I was going to make sure he wanted for nothing, including oatmeal, next to which he had written "cinnamon spice or plain." I hesitated, right there reading the list, because of course I wasn't going to just get him plain (that's so boring!), but I was pretty sure what he liked was maple brown sugar. Hm.

When I arrived in the cereal aisle of the grocery store, I encountered a tragedy of epic proportions: there were no individual boxes of cinnamon spice oatmeal, just combo packs that also included apple cinnamon (which no one in our house likes) and maple brown sugar. So now I was faced with a dilemma, one that I fully realized was retribution for not having clarified the all important cinnamon spice question before leaving the house: what would really make Mark happiest?

I mean, I know he said cinnamon spice, but I keep track of these things, you know, and I'm pretty sure that what he actually likes is maple brown sugar. But if I just get the maple brown sugar, then I'm specifically buying what he didn't ask for. Maybe he's in the mood for cinnamon spice and will be angry and disappointed if I substitute a more convenient flavor, even one he likes. But if I get the multi-pack, I'm going to have to eat all the damn apple cinnamon that no one likes or waste food and money by throwing it out. I was tempted to call him for clarification, but my phone was out of batteries.

So I stood in front of that oatmeal and ran through my various oatmeal purchasing choices for five minutes (I know. It's exhausting to be me.) before I finally settled on two variety packs and one package of plain oatmeal.

The next day, Mark paused, spoonful of oatmeal in hand and said, "You know what? I just realized it's actually maple brown sugar that I like better!" And I wanted to reach over and strangle him. What did he mean he liked maple brown sugar better? After all I'd gone through. I could well have gotten him the wrong thing! And now I was going to end up eating all the apple cinnamon for nothing. Damn it! And this was the second time in as many weeks something like this had happened.

You see, a while back, he had picked up a two pack of cleaning wipes at the store: a tub of "fresh scent" packaged in green and a tub of "lemon fresh" packaged in yellow. After cleaning the bathroom, he said, "You know. There's something I don't like about the way the green ones smell. I like the yellow ones better." Duly noted: Mark does not like the green ones; never buy them again. So, I assiduously bought only yellow packages of cleaning wipes, even when the green ones were on sale. After all, I couldn't subject Mark to the green ones that he didn't like. (The horror!)

The only problem was, the next time Mark had to pick up cleaning wipes from the store himself, he picked up a huge tub of... yes, the green ones. "But you don't like these!" I spluttered, furious that he'd bought the evil green wipes. He'd bought THE WRONG ONES! And I wasn't even angry because I don't like the green ones; I don't care. I was mad because he doesn't like the green ones.

"Oh," said Mark, "I don't?"

"You said you didn't like the way they smell!"

"Oh, yeah. I guess I did. Oh well."

Oh well? Was he serious? That's it? Oh well?! How dare he not even know what he likes! I take up precious mental real estate with this information! I can't follow my kids' math homework, and it's probably because all of my brain cells are being devoted to keeping track of important things like "Mark's favorite oatmeal flavor" and "Mark's preferred scent of cleaning wipes." Things that Mark... doesn't. even. think. are. important...

Oh.

So, it turns out Mark can take care of himself just fine. Mark isn't keeping track of that stuff because emit actually doesn't matter to him/em. He didn't ask me to go through all that trouble for the oatmeal or the wipes (or many of the other things I've done over the years). He didn't even say those things were important. In fact, in the case of the oatmeal, he explicitly told me it wasn't, and that something else was important to him instead.

But I desperately want the never-ending list of things I keep track of to matter to him. I want him to bow down to me in everlasting gratitude to my hyper awareness of his wishes and my superior knowledge of his cleaning wipe scent preferences. I want to be officially crowned the nicest, most thoughtful, most caring, awesomest wife ever. Yes, sir. A woman who knows her cinnamon spice from her maple brown sugar is a keeper. He's gotta stick to me like glue if he wants to get his oatmeal (or his cleaning wipes or anything else in his life) right. But if I start making mistakes... Oh. I could lose my crown! He could find out I'm a mere mortal — just a regular old average wife — and skip right out. Which is what leads me to stand in a grocery store staring at oatmeal for five minutes in sheer panic at my inability to get it just the way he's going to want it.

I take care Mark and other people that I love, in a good, loving way, but I also do it in a bad way. (Although fortunately not bad in the cop drama bad guy kind of way, with my fedora tilted menacingly over one eye, as I bark to my hit man, "Take care of the snitch, Joey.") I can be some slapstick girl scout heroine: so focused on the merit badge I'm going to win for being helpful that I insistently try to help a perfectly capable, able-bodied person across the street, tripping them and myself, scattering their groceries and causing scrapes and bruises all around (although generally less hilarity).

In fact — especially if we all do make it to the other side of the street safely (thanks to me, of course) — I often remain blissfully unaware. Sometimes the realization that I'm doing the bad, codependent kind of helping doesn't hit me until I'm sitting there, knocked flat on my ass, with my literal and metaphorical groceries scattered around me, angry that emsomeone/em (ok, my husband Mark) hasn't appreciated my spectacular helpfulness the way he should.

I guess this will teach me I should dump Mark's grocery preferences out of my head so I can free up some space for more important things, like how to do elementary school math so I can help my kids with their homework. And hey! Maybe they'll appreciate me instead...*

Our family keeps a pretty rigorous schedule, with nearly every night of the week blocked out for some activity or another, but rather than shuttling between soccer games and dance practice, like many parents in our social group, we're shuttling between different 12 Step meetings.

So, a week ago, as I was lying in bed making the decision to try to attend my first Overeater's Anonymous (OA) meeting, my first thought was: How am I going to fit this in? I mean, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday nights as well as Saturday mornings are booked. What if the only meeting in the area meets on Monday nights? Am I willing to give up my COSA Step group for a new meeting? Or what if it's on Tuesday nights? I definitely can't do it then. But if it's on Fridays, well that's one of the few nights we have together as a family...

Then I realized I was (as usual) getting ahead of myself. I took a deep breath, stopped myself from running to the computer right away to look up meeting times and told myself to wait until morning to see how things actually stood and take it from there. The next morning, I typed in my ZIP code, selected a wide radius and hoped there would be one meeting I could somehow squeeze in. I remembered when, shortly after discovering my husband's sex addiction, I was looking for a meeting for partners of sex addicts. There was just one meeting for just one group within a fifty mile radius of my home, and that group consisted of only four or five women.

So, when the OA search results came back, I had to laugh. There were dozens of meetings at all times of the day, every day. I could easily fit in a meeting while the kids were at school any day of the week. And when I attended the meeting. Wow. There were dozens of people: more people there than in any of the sessions I attended at COSA's International Convention and enough people to volunteer for all sorts of positions that the groups I've attended have never been able to support. (We're lucky if we can support secretary, treasurer and literature person without having to double up on responsibilities.)

It made me wonder (not for the first time) where all the friends and family members of sex addicts were hiding. And as thrilling as it was to be in a room with that much recovery, and to have access to so many meetings in my area for a problem I'm struggling with, it also made me sad that the same vibrant community is so hard to find for those struggling to heal from the wounds of sex addiction.

I'm completely ashamed of this — what I now recognize as an attempt to control his addiction — but when I shared this with a friend, she said she thought it was brilliant. In her opinion, my control freakishness inspired me to an innovative approach to the problem. I was a codependent Thomas Edison. Of course, there was the little matter of it, you know, not working. I hadn't so much invented the codependent lightbulb as set up a sluttly cardboard cutout to sit beside me and try to harness lightning directly through our bodies.

But as I was flipping through a catalog recently, I found I'm not the only codependent with fabulous ideas. Someone has decided to create a product that will help prevent their alcoholic or drug addicted partners from driving under the influence: a picture frame that clips onto a car visor and sends the following message (I'm paraphrasing of course): "If you really loved your family, you'd drive sober." Sure, that's not the literal message and it has a wider appeal than just addicts — theoretically, it's for any unsafe driver — but partners of alcoholics and other addicts are veritable gold mine for the manufacturers of this frame.  (Come on, you Al-Anoners and Nar-Anoners know you would have wanted one!)

Like my alter-ego, this little frame brilliant in its own way, but it's also doomed to failure (at least on addicts).  What addicts do or don't do isn't about those of us who love them; it's about the addiction.  And a picture of someone's family isn't going to prevent what the family themselves can't control even when they're present.

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...