My son Austen* looks like most nine-year-olds, except perhaps a bit taller, with long legs that carry him swiftly across the ground as he races you to the car or the door of the house or the mailbox. He has curly brown hair, golden brown skin and painfully long, lush eyelashes ringing his deep brown eyes. When he flashes you a big grin -- as he does when he's thinking about something funny that happened at school or his latest high score on a favorite video game -- you see those new adult teeth that still look a bit too big for his mouth, like a young colt's. His fingernails have a tendency to be dirty, for the same reason the palms of his hands are calloused: from swinging on monkey bars and climbing trees.

What you won't notice immediately is his disability...

Read the rest at: http://blog.beliefnet.com/thinplaces/2010/09/perfectly-human-invisible-by-mary-p-jones.html

"I hate that you don't have a blog," said a woman about to undergo heart surgery, as she gazed sincerely up at her boyfriend, "I hate that I don't know what you're thinking."

Mark and I burst into raucous laughter and had to pause the episode of House that we were watching to wipe away our tears of glee and catch our breath.  Seriously?  "I hate that you don't have a blog?" Really?  Yep.  That's what we personal (and dare I say it, female?) bloggers are all supposed to be like.  So divorced from real life connections, so caught up in deluding ourselves about these supposed "friendships" we have online, so obsessed with our hit count, so eager for an audience, so narcissistic, that we can't even talk to our partners or parent our children, at least not unless there's a screen between us.

The comments on the recent Motherlode post on "mommy blogging" back up this perception. There are lots of women there talking about the community and connections they've made and about the therapeutic release of writing.  And there are plenty of others saying those connections aren't real and that the children of these deluded, self-obsessed women are being sorely neglected.

And it makes me wonder, why do people think bloggers and other social networkers are so crazy and scary and dangerous and delusional?  Why is an online presence portrayed as something that precludes, rather than enhances or supplements, other relationships?  What makes friendships "real?"  Why do we believe that people don't know what "real" relationships look like?  Why does it matter so much how people (particularly women) spend their free time?  What makes us believe that online time is not, in fact, free time, but time that is being taken away from more important things?  For that matter, why do we always have to be doing something "important?"  What makes something "important" in the first place? (From what I read "important" is anything from things I'd count as truly important -- like spending time with loved ones -- to things I consider not at all important -- like making sure the house is tidy and/or we're making more money.)  What makes it ok for a published author of personal essays or a memoir to write in detail about herself, her life, her children, her friends, her family, but not ok for bloggers to do the same?

If there are any universal answers to those questions, I don't know them.  What I do know is that there are hundreds of people who have passed in and out of my life and have all seen a sliver of me, both online and offline: sitting next to me in a movie theater, driving me a few miles in a taxi, clicking on a link to my blog and clicking right back out again.  I know that there have been dozens to hundreds of lurkers in my life, both online and offline, who have seen bits and pieces of me (and not always the nice bits, nor for that matter, always the nasty ones): the neighbors who (assuredly) heard Mark and me arguing or laughing or having sex through the thin walls of our old apartment just the way we heard them, the folks at the next table in the restaurant listening to our conversations, the people silently reading my blog.

I know that I have hundreds of people I've talked to and spent time with each day over the years, who've shared a workplace or the classroom or the social space, both online and offline: coworkers, high school and college buddies, neighbors, moms at my kids' schools, folks in online discussion groups, blog readers, fellow bloggers.  Some I know well, have fun with and consider good friends.  Others are acquaintances whom I don't know, and still others I don't really like at all (and vice versa, I'm sure).

Then I know that there are people in my life, both online and offline, who are my soulmates: the ones who are family or like family, the ones who would know my voice (spoken or written) anywhere, the ones I call first when I have joys or sorrows to share, the ones who can come into my house and help themselves to a drink or a snack, the ones I laugh and cry and eat ice cream with, the ones who see me -- as me, all of me -- and get me, and are there for me, as I am for them.

Some of those soulmates are people like Jay (whom I've known for almost a decade now) and JW (who is my son Austen's absolute favorite person in the world to talk to long-distance (just don't tell his grandparents)); people I met online.  I didn't know what they looked like or what their voices sounded like or get to see or touch them in the flesh for years.  And some of those soulmates are people like my husband Mark or my friend Kelly; people I happened to meet "in real life."

I also know that I am fortunate enough to have six hours a day free when my kids are in school and my husband is at work.  I know that I spend the vast majority of that time on housework, household administration and errands that are unseen by the and unacknowledged by people both in and out of the blogosphere.  And I know that I take some of those six hours, as a gift to myself and a support to others, to write.  I know there are people who don't respect that or see it as useless and "a waste of time" because I either don't get paid (or don't get paid much) for that.  I also know that I love my life and the way I spend my days, and that although what I contribute to the world (whether in doing the dishes or feeding my kids or blogging) may seem small, it's important: just as, in my favorite movie, It's a Wonderful Life, George Bailey's life and work in his small town was as valuable as anything he ever could have done if he'd gone out and built those bridges and skyscrapers he dreamed of.

No doubt there are people out there who become so obsessed with some aspect of their life or group of friends that they ignore other relationships.  No doubt there are people who can't tell the difference between a genuine friendship and the high of a falsely instant connection (I'm married to someone in recovery for just that, remember?).  No doubt someone, somewhere in the world, has to conduct a poll of everyone she knows before making major life choices.  No doubt there is a mom out there somewhere who is ignoring her kids while she does something else.  But all of that is hardly new to the Internet, just as "real" friends in my life haven't been confined strictly to people happen to have met in person.

And that's why Mark and I laughed as we listened to that fictional blogger on House.  We laughed knowing that I blog (about intimate details of our lives) and he doesn't.  We laughed knowing that we were snuggling on the sofa watching House after talking for over two hours -- about everything from mundane topics, like scheduling the kids' doctors appointments, to quite serious matters about our marriage -- during which I never once wistfully opined that it would go better with a keyboard in hand.  We laughed because Mark knows me better than anyone, online or off.  And we laughed because we both knew exactly what bits and pieces of those few hours spent talking and watching TV would go on the blog and what never would.

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.

"The level of sexual imagery in modern life is astounding. I knew intuitively this was true, but when you tune into it, you just can't believe it. I click on the Yahoo! finance page, and there's this blond model in a low-cut dress looking at a computer screen and nibbling alluringly on the temple of her glasses, apparently very aroused by the latest S&P 500 report."
~ A.J. Jacobs, The Year of Living Biblically

Years ago, when my husband Mark and I were first married, we went away for the weekend, leaving the little city (or big town) we called home to drive to a bed and breakfast on a ranch in the middle of big rolling fields of nowhere.  At night, we could look up and see a sky, not just dotted with a few twinkling stars against a vast blackness, but absolutely littered with more light than darkness.  But even more than the presence of stars, I remember the silence.

There were no cars rumbling past outside, no neighbors talking or banging doors shut, no fire sirens or televisions, no computer network humming and no cell phone coverage.  It was so quiet, I actually had trouble sleeping; the absence of sound rang audibly in my ears.  I didn't realize I was surrounded by a constant whir of background noise until it wasn't there, but when I went back home I was suddenly both very much aware of it and increasingly bothered by it.  Was it good for me to have so much noise in my life that I heard actual ringing in my ears when it was quiet, the same way I have on leaving a rock concert?  At the same time, that level of background noise was clearly normal in the place and culture in which I was living; could I get away from it?

In a way, moving from addiction to recovery felt the same way, as I began to tune in to the ambient noise of our culture.  Suddenly, that billboard or that song or that TV ad wasn't just part of a constant, and largely ignored, backdrop; it was the trigger that could bring the trauma of addiction rushing to engulf me again.  Being married to a recovering sex addict meant suddenly being faced with the need to avoid gratuitous sexual content in order to protect my own sanity.  And that meant becoming acutely aware of just how soaked in sexuality American culture is: everything from hamburgers to web hosting are sold on overtones of porn.  (And seriously, I can think of few things less inherently erotic than ground beef and Internet domain name registration.)

Recovery has also meant looking at patterns of alcoholism and addiction among our extended friends and family, and becoming similarly aware of the pervasiveness of alcohol, which is an integral, accepted, even expected part of everything from weddings to sporting events to birthday parties.

And once I did begin to tune in, I wondered, much as I did when I came home from those nights on that secluded ranch: had all that cultural noise (unnoticed, but loud enough to leave my ears ringing in its absence) been good for me?  I didn't think so.  So, from ad blocking software to a DVR to changes in my own routines, I've worked to beat back the noise our culture throws off and journey toward the quiet that I now crave.

Eight years ago, in spite of the fact that we were both exhausted by caring for our infant son, I found that my husband Mark was staying up later and later at night. He had to be up at 5 a.m. to get ready for work, yet I would wake some nights at 2 or 3 or 4 a.m. to my son, wailing for a feeding or a diaper change, and find Mark's side of the bed empty, cold, untouched. Then I'd glance to the bedroom door and see the eerie blue glow of the computer screen in the next room creeping in. And I knew he was looking at porn. Sometimes I'd ask him to come to bed, sometimes I'd just stew and wait. And in the morning, I'd wonder, "Should I be worried about this? If he is, is it a big deal? Is this ok? Is it normal?"

Those seemed like legitimate questions at the time. He wouldn't stay up every night. And sometimes he was actually doing some work, or starting off doing some work. (Hey, I'm codependent. I spied, so I know.) I knew he was looking at some porn, but I didn't have a problem with porn. It was one of those things guys did, right? And I even viewed it myself. But this seemed like a lot. Did he have a problem? Or was I crazy and overreacting? (I knew he fell on the side of crazy and overreacting. But if he was crazy then his evaluation of the situation couldn't be trusted.) I simply didn't trust myself or my own feelings. I wanted some neutral third party to say where the line should be drawn, to define exactly what was normal, what was ok, what was worrisome, what was a problem.

I was thinking about all this as I read an article about how his porn use is the equivalent of her pedicures, a way to relax and blow off steam. The author of the piece asked questions like "should you be worried?" and tried to reassure partners that, even if porn use bothers them, it may not be a "big deal." They may be overreacting. All of which made me want to punch the author in the nose and then send him to a therapist who could teach him not to invalidate people's feelings. (What? Are you saying I still have control issues? No worries, I'll lovingly detach and let him crash and burn and learn on his own.)

The reason I got fussy when I read that, is because it took me some time in recovery to realize that there is no "should" when it comes to feelings. And that lesson is still raw. It's something that I am apt to forget as I fall back into fretting over whether or not I "should" be upset or angry or worried. I'll wonder who is right and who is wrong and who is crazy and who is sane and what's normal and grind myself to bits hoping that the world will arbitrate in my favor.

But here's the thing: a problem is a problem. If something worries me, it's worrisome to me. If my husband was staying up at night looking at porn, and it was bothering me, it didn't matter if he was an addict or not; it was bothering me! And it was ok for me to be bothered by it even if it wasn't a problem for him. If my feelings about his porn use were interfering with our relationship, then there was a problem with porn use in our relationship. Likewise, if I'm spending money on spa vacations and my husband is getting anxious and irritable about that, if he's feeling threatened because I'm spending time having my pedicurist massage my feet rather than him, then my spa time is an issue in our relationship, even if pedicures are perfectly healthy and relaxing for me and he "shouldn't" be upset. It doesn't matter how he or I "should" feel, it only matters how we do feel.

Thankfully, we've found recovery programs and therapists that have helped us deal with our problems in a way that has acknowledged and respected each of our feelings, rather than telling us that the way to solve the problem was to convince us that we should stop having those feelings.

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.

So, school has started and the kids are bringing home all manner of illnesses, and when I'm not tending to someone who is sick, I'm battling the sleep deprivation and chaos that follow in the wake of caring for someone who is sick.  All of which is not normal, in my opinion.  The world must march on at the pace I set!  How dare perfectly predictable unexpected things crop up!  Ah well.  Soon everyone will be well, and I'll be back to that fantasy of normal.  I can't wait!

A few years ago, I was visiting my friend Ellie and was a guest in her house for the first time in my life.  I had just taken a shower and was standing in her bathroom, a wet towel in my hand, at a loss for what to do.  Should I hang the towel on the rack?  Sling it over the shower?  Hang it on the bar inside the shower door?  And should I fold it in half or lay it out flat?  Maybe I should fold it in thirds?  Should I throw it in the laundry room?  Or maybe there was some other way of handling towels that I wasn't even aware of...  These seem like small things, but they deeply concerned me.  What was the right way to take care of a wet towel?

Oh, sure.  I knew what I would do at home.  But I also eat in front of the TV, chewing with my mouth open and resting my bare feet on the coffee table, at home.  And that, my friends, is certainly not the "right" way to eat.  I was pretty sure that there was a way to hang the towel that would signal that I was raised by wolves and would bring shame to my entire family.  My parents would be greatly disappointed in me, knowing they had told me a million times how to hang a towel, and now, at this critical moment, I had completely forgotten all they taught me about how people ought to do things.

I was going to be judged and found wanting.  I was going to be unmasked for what I was: crude and thoughtless.  Ellie was going to walk into that bathroom, see that towel hung up in some clearly, horribly, offensively wrong manner and was going to think I didn't love her enough to take care of her towels properly.  I'd never be invited back.  Our friendship would grow distant.  All over this towel!  And even if — through a sheer luck, — I passed this towel test, I was probably going to use the wrong fork at dinner.  Or put my elbows on the table.  Or forget to make my bed in the morning (I don't make mine daily at home).  Or make the bed the wrong way.  Or put my foot square in my mouth over something.

There went my brain, dashing off down those rutted, well worn tracks.  I'd seen people in my life cut down and cut out for things like the way they hang their wet towels, and I'd been cut down and cut out for similar things enough in past relationships that such questions and worries had become a matter of habit.  Somewhere along the line, I'd gotten it into my head that there was a right way to do everything, and everything must be done that way, perfectly.  If not, what followed was judgment, shame, humiliation, rejection and abandonment.  Those thoughts were so routine, I never even noticed them.  But this time, standing there in Ellie's bathroom, with a little bit of recovery behind me, I finally caught myself on that race to Crazytown and laughed out loud.  For crying out loud, it's a wet towel!  And everything is going to be ok, no matter how I hang it up.

So, I hung up the towel, left the bathroom and joined Ellie for breakfast.

We took the kids to a pool party at the home of some friends of mine recently. The hosts, as well as several guests, moved a fair drive away from us several years ago, and several more guests were visiting from out of town. As a result, none of them had seen my children in quite a long time, but they are all old enough friends to be familiar with our family dynamics and with Austen's quirks.

They knew him when he was an infant and his colicky wails had me edgier than that time a car backfired in the movie theater parking lot right after Saving Private Ryan. (And let me tell you, if it had been up to me to storm the beaches at Normandy and such, Hitler would totally have won World War II.) They've been there, sometimes live and sometimes by phone or e-mail, through the autism diagnosis; through speech, occupational and behavioral therapies; through all our concerns about his limited diet; through trials and triumphs in school. They know he's a sweet kid, skilled with numbers, blessed with a fabulous memory and an encyclopedic knowledge of his particular interests. They were all aware that parties can sometimes be overwhelming for Austen, that meeting new people (and many of them were essentially new to him after all this time) can provoke anxiety, that he'll often refuse to eat outside our home and that we sometimes have to cut visits short if all of these factors combined prove too overwhelming for him. And they all accepted him (and us) as is.

We went to the party, as we always do, with a "let's see how it goes for all of us" attitude. And what we saw was: Austen and Janie having a great time in the pool. Austen and Janie playing video games with the other kids at the party while we chatted with adults. Austen happily eating his dinner in a new place. Both kids begging not to have to leave yet and asking when we could come back. Yes, the pool party went, well, swimmingly. (It would take a stronger willpower than mine to resist that pun.)

Everyone marveled at how much Austen enjoyed himself, and even thrived, on that particular day in a situation that he's had difficulty tolerating in the past. And when it was all over, for one brief moment, I thought, "Everyone is going to think I'm some kind of crazy Munchausen Autism by Proxy mama, making up lies about a completely typical child to get attention. Exhibit A: he's a happy kid who enjoyed a party. And that is not part of what people think autism is supposed to look like."

But then I thought back over the party: how the event centered around two of his favorite activities (swimming and video games), how everyone pleasantly addressed him by his chosen nickname, how no one offered him food or pressured him to eat with the rest of the people there, how he got a quiet room to eat his preferred food peacefully by himself, how the hostess quietly alerted me rather than chastising him when he undressed in the middle of the living room and started walking around the house naked, how when a birthday cake was produced everyone refrained from singing knowing that "Happy Birthday" drives Austen to howling tears (I think this should be part of the autism diagnosis personally, because Austen is far from the only autistic child I know who feels that level of antipathy for the song). This variety of little things took no real effort and detracted from no one else's enjoyment, but added greatly to Austen's.

And I thought, "Then again, maybe a happy kid enjoying a party isn't what people expect autism to look like, but it is exactly what autism is supposed to look like."

Image credit: Photo by kchbrown on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons

A few weeks ago, I got an e-mail from a woman named Paula Saardchit. She told me she'd found my blog while doing research for an article she was writing on sex addiction for her website, and she wanted to write and tell me how moved she was by my story. Of course, I was curious to know more about her site, so I googled her. And I found out that she helps women plan lingerie and sex toy parties. (And I know what kind of party some of you have in mind. No, not that kind! You know, this is like a Tupperware party, only with vibrators.)

When I found out about my husband's sex addiction, one of the first things I did was get out my big, black garbage bags and start dumping in porn, lingerie and sex toys. The sight of them, of anything that made me think of sex or by extension of my husband's sexual acting out, made me want to vomit. So off in a landfill somewhere are all the artifacts of my subconscious attempts to control my husband and keep his sexual attention firmly fixed on constantly exciting, porn star me: the dildos and the vibrators, the bustiers and fishnet stockings and the crotchless panties and the wigs and the costumes, the X-rated board games and the porn DVDs. Yeah, I tried it all. Well, except a stripper pole. That hadn't occurred to me yet. And thank goodness because how would I have carted that out to the trash?

I had been as conventionally sexy and exciting and adventurous and engaged as can be, and my husband loved it. But it wasn't enough. That endless, aching need of his wanted more than I could give. More than all the women in all the lingerie with all the sex toys in the world could give. And still I wanted to give it. Which is how I ended up there, with the black Hefty bag in my hand, sick to my stomach with shame and disgust and rage.

And now, six years later, I was on a lingerie party website, full of pictures of that conventional sexy I dumped in the trash, wondering what kind of sex addiction article Paula intended to write. As I glanced at the site, I saw that there was plenty of the usual "hot" and "titillating" sex selling, but Paula also genuinely seemed to see these parties as a way of empowering women to learn about and appreciate their own bodies. Black and white thinking is common in the lives of addicts and those who live with them, and I've been slowly working toward a place where, after fully indulging in our culture's idea of "sexy" and then fully rejecting it (from lingerie to makeup to shaving my legs), I am exploring more shades of grey. So, just because I can't incorporate lingerie and sex toys into my relationship in a healthy way right now, doesn't mean they are evil in themselves. There are definitely aspects of lingerie and sex toys that I'm deeply uncomfortable with, and even perceive as dangerous to women, but there was enough that was positive about Paula's site that when she asked if she could interview me, I said, "Well, send me your questions and I'll see."

When I saw the questions, I found that not only was I comfortable with answering them all, this would be a good opportunity to reach out to women who may not realize (yet) that their partners are sex addicts. (I mean, what better place to find a sex addict's partner in denial than out buying lingerie?) So, while many women may be using Paula's parties as a healthy expression of their sexuality, I (taking to heart that 12 Step message of reaching out to those still suffering) couldn't pass up the opportunity to plant some seeds among those who might be indulging in sexy, not as an act of empowerment, but as one of desperation and degradation.

Then had to take that last leap of faith that Paula would put it up as I expressed it before I clicked send. (Not that I have trust issues or anything!) And she did. The interview is up, and after having thought long and hard about linking out to such a potentially triggering site, I thought I would share it with you all, especially since many of you don't have sex addiction as part of your lives at all and may find it interesting. There is nothing in the content of my interview that I wouldn't post here, but images and links in the header and sidebar are related to lingerie and sex toys. So, one last time before the link...

Warning: Sex addicts and their partners may find images and language in the linked site triggering!

(If the thought of clicking through raises any concerns about your sobriety or serenity, please feel free to e-mail me for a copy of the information contained in the interview instead.)

And here's the link (isn't it cute that I'm an expert?): Interview with Mary P Jones at Lingerie Party and Adult Toys.