I haven't written much in the past year or so, and I haven't checked my messages in months. And this blog has started to feel more like a weight that I don't need to carry anymore. There's simply not much more to tell. Not here. I have stories about where I was before and where I am now, but those aren't MPJ's stories. They're My stories. The Me that includes, but is much more than, MPJ.

So, for the time being, I'll set this blog down and leave what's here for other Internet travelers to find as they may, like artifacts in the dust. Perhaps one of you will find something here you can use. If I ever do edit all this into something readable, I'll check back in. But I'd like to call this farewell for now. MPJ is going away to be subsumed into the greater Me again. I'm grateful our paths have crossed here, and I wish you all well in your journeys, wherever they take you.

So imagine my surprise when I flipped a my copy of recovery writing queen Melody Beattie's The Language of Letting Go open to a random page today and saw (in italics, under the heading "Letting Go of Old Beliefs"): "Try harder. Do better. Be perfect."  Hmm.  Sound familiar?

I think there can be only one explanation, considering that the book was published in 1990: Melody Beattie is a time traveler.  She time traveled forward to the 21st century, eavesdropped on my group, thought "now there's a great idea for my book!" and then time traveled back to write it.  Either that or we codies all have something in common when it comes to being crazy-ass perfectionists.  But nah.  That couldn't be, could it?

There is a parable in the book 7 Habits of Highly Effective People about a person who works harder and harder to saw down a tree because of a perception that there is no time to stop, take a break and sharpen the saw. I have never been a big saw sharpener. I like to push and push and say, "Just this one more thing and then I can take a break. I'll stop when this is finished. It would be selfish of me to stop when other people aren't." And because I'm a perfectionist, I have rarely been able to get that one more thing to a state where it is finished enough to satisfy me, so I hack away endlessly at that tree with an old toothless saw.

This summer, my kids been staying up later, enjoying the long summer days, and I have been getting less by extension. We've had more visitors, as people travel in the summer and between the kids and the guests, I haven't had much time for solitude, something I deeply need to sharpen my own mental and spiritual saw. I've been striking a better balance than in years past, by prioritizing and cutting back on activities (like blogging), but as the summer draws to a close I've still be exhausted and cranky in a way that I'm not during the school year, when I can count on a little time each day where I can at least use the bathroom without anyone needing me. And, unlike in times past, I could recognize the wear and the need for time to repair it before I collapsed.

So, a few weeks ago, Mark volunteered to watch the kids while I took the weekend off. It wasn't anything fancy, just a cheap room in a nearby hotel for two nights. And I didn't do anything fancy, just slept and watched a few cheesy movies I'd rented. But when I came back home, I felt so much better. As soon as I walked through the door, Mark said, "You look so much more relaxed." And I was.

I was also profoundly grateful that, guilty as I felt about taking time for me and spending money (especially with both the economy and Mark's work situation a little shaky) on me, I was able to do it: able to have the resources and help I need to make it possible right now and able, through the past years I've spent working my recovery, to ask for what I need and allow myself to do it.

After posting almost daily for over two years, I have taken my longest ever break from my space here.  I have posted a few things recently at The Second Road, but have yet to link to them from here.  I just figured I'd pop in, say hi and let you all know that we have had a good summer and I should be back on track in September.  Also now that I have two kids both in full day school, I'm hoping I'll have time to do exciting and productive things like update my sidebars and figure out why my blog is so slow to load recently.  Thanks to those of you who have checked in on me.  I love and miss you all and hope to see more of you soon.

I didn't know, at a glance what was going on in the picture.  I didn't know who any of the people were.  What caught my eye was the man in the center who seemed so small, powerless and vulnerable: all those big, tough men in hats and suits and even uniforms around, and he's in a dressed casually, in a sweater.  There's a look of agony on his face as he curls into himself, in an overdue, futile gesture of protection.  And for me all of that meant love at first sight.  I needed to know who he was, this tiny man who was crying out, silently, who so clearly needed something, someone.

So I read the caption.  Oh.  Kennedy's assassin.  Awkward.  Not exactly the guy your friends and family will understand you hanging up in poster form above your bed.

Still, I surreptitiously read all I could on Oswald.  I would have loved some conspiracy theories back then, but the official sources at my disposal left me no hope of his innocence.  And it wasn't like he came across as a pleasant guy independent of the whole Kennedy assassination mess, what with the whole high school drop out, military drop out, Soviet defector drop out, narcissistic, wife beater thing going on.

But that image of him, like eyes meeting across a crowded room, stayed with me and I romanticized him anyway.  After all, that quiveringly vulnerable man couldn't be bad, not really.  If he'd turned out that way, it had only been because he'd never met anyone who understood him, who saw him for the sweet, hurt little boy he was and loved him right.  I had this feeling that if only I could travel back in time and meet him in his youth, we could date and discuss Marx together and I could finally fix hm in a way that the people in his life had clearly failed to.  Yes, I was going to change history, restore Kennedy to life (handsome and vibrant) by curing a mentally ill murderer with the power of my love.

A time machine failing to appear, Oswald was eventually forgotten.  And I went on to try my hand at fixing real life men with my love instead.  I only remembered him when I saw that image one more time and thought, "If I'd lived back then and met Oswald, I'd have ended up victim to his abuse, and Kennedy would still have died in Dallas."  Well, unless LBJ did it...

Wind lashes the trees.
The water churns angry white.
I can't let this be.

Sacrifice a goat.
Strike a deal with the unseen.
Beg storms for respite.

I'm too busy to
board windows, batten hatches
or leave the storm's path.

Against all my will
the storm comes rushing in, then
skies clear without help.

This, my fool's errand:
To prevent the hurricane,
save him from himself.

I am powerless
over the rushing maelstrom:
over addiction.

Do I think I could
command the winds or the sea?
Or reason with them?

I can fight the rain
or admit powerlessness
and find true power.

Lying on the seat
soft hair brushes the collar
tucked under his chin.

I want to paint him;
freeze him, lips blue under ice;
encase him in glass.

He may wake sighing.
Worries -- gone in sleep -- descend
all in an instant.

But I've forgotten
all that came before this and
all that came after.

This moment only
is encased in memory
as if in amber.

When I was little, my Brownie troop went to visit a home for children with disabilities. I got the impression that somehow all of us normal kids in our spiffy uniforms were somehow supposed to cheer their lonesome lives. At some point in the days preceding this visit, I also got the romantic notion that I would meet my new best friend there. She would be (in accordance with the only picture I had of people who were disabled) wheelchair bound, and thus, different and separate from other people, but otherwise much like me. In particular, she would (like me) have retreated into a world of books, since no one else in her real life would be able to relate to her. I pictured myself walking into a large, sunlit room where I'd see here quietly seated in her wheelchair, wearing a neat white dress with a lavender sash. Then I would sweep in and see past the wheelchair that blinded the rest of the world to her specialness and discover a true literary kinship of the soul as we discussed Nancy Drew over cookies.

When actually confronted with a room full of disabled children, I cowered in a folding chair in the corner, silently praying that we'd leave soon. The room was dim and noisy, lit with fading fluorescent bulbs. Everything in the room was some dull shade of brown: the floors, the walls, the folding chairs. None of the children wore crisp white dresses, although some were in wheelchairs. They couldn't speak or read or eat cookies.

When I went to college, I thought that I would at last be where I belonged: in a university full of like-minded and like-valued individuals. I pictured dorms an classrooms filled with sensitive, but not too pretentious, poets. We'd enjoy reading T.S. Eliot together over tea and cookies. That image shattered when I left my door unlocked one morning and went down the hall to use the bathroom. I came back to find a drunken frat boy, smudged Greek letters painted on his cheeks, passed out on my bed wearing nothing but his jock strap. He'd been too disoriented to find his own room and had definitely already tossed his cookies in the men's room next door.

When I got married, I thought I'd finally found my one true love: the person who would finally fulfill and complete me for the rest of my life. But less than six years in, I was (yet again) looking for a new kind of soulmate; I searched the rooms of my S-Anon meetings looking among the other partners of sex addicts for my new best friend. I listened to each share trying to find one that I could really relate to. This friend and I would understand each other completely and go out to coffee shops together the meetings and heal as we shared over cookies. I never found that person. Everyone told a different story and none was completely like mine.

As my recovery progressed, I began to see that this — my constant search for the one perfect person who would complete me — was part of my dysfunction and my own warped thinking. And I stopped looking. I realized that there were times in my life when I hadn't been looking. I had joined a parenting group without giving much thought of making friends, just looking to give and receive support. I started blogging to write, not even realizing it was a means of social networking. I went to events at my children's schools. In some cases I just had pleasant conversations, in others I met people who have deeply enriched my life every day since. No one of them completes me in every way, heals every wound, fills every emptiness but each makes my life more beautiful in his or her own way. And I suspect I would have missed that if I were evaluating each person only in terms of how well they fit my perfect image of a parent or a writer or a friend, just as I missed so many chances to see what others had to offer: the children I didn't meet as a Brownie or the college classmates I dismissed or the other women in S-Anon whose stories seemed unlike mine at the time.

I was thinking about that as I went to my new COSA meeting. I'm no longer looking to this meeting to give me something, to provide me with that perfect person whose recovery and story I relate to in every way. I'm trying to go in open to the experience, whatever it may be. And if my experience has taught me anything, it's that I'm bound to find a lot more there than I'd ever get from an imaginary soulmate. And if I want, I can even bring my own cookies.