One Month Ago
Rex’s organs twisted and gushed as he picked up the phone to call his ex-wife. To call her and tell her that it had to stop. To call her and tell her that she had to stop. To tell her that he wouldn’t let her around their children when she was like this. Stoned like this.
It broke his heart to think of Rosie without her children. Her children without their mother. But this wasn’t their mother.
Rex said these things to Rosie as gently and kindly as he could.
“When they’re in my world, I get to make the rules,” Rosie came back sharply before Rex could even finish his plea. But there was an airiness, a detachment, in her voice that Rex didn’t recognize. Rex had seen Rosie frazzled, even untethered, a few times in their relationship. And she had been frazzled and untethered in precisely the way she had been in every other facet of her life. Wholly and fully. But not now. Not in these words. Not in this new state. She sounded so far away.
“Rosie, your rules don’t get to be that there are no rules. It’s not fair to them,” Rex said as gently as he could. But his disappointment, his desperation, his exasperation was thinly veiled.
There was silence on both ends.
“It’s just not fair, Rosie. You need to do better here. You need to, Rosie.”
More silence.
“You just need to.”
Rex said it, urged it, with all of the kindness he could muster.
And then Rosie moved so quickly to tears.
“I love them, Rex. I love them so much.”
All Rosie’s anguish, and sorrow, and hopelessness was pouring out of her eyes and straight through the phone. Her suffering coursed through his veins and clung to his heart.
And then his ex-wife asked so simply, so innocently, so naively, “Isn’t that enough?”
And then Rosie fell into full sobs.
“Why can’t it be enough?”
And then Rex, invoking all the love he still had for Rosie, said something so plain, and so true. But so difficult.
“No, baby. It’s not enough. You need help, Rosie,” Rex stated calmly, plainly and warmly. “But it needs to come from you. You need to get yourself help.”
There was a moment of thick, sticky silence.
“Okay? Can you do that, Rosie?” Rex said into the phone.
He held his ear to the phone. And then, through breathless whimpers, Rosie said, “I need some time away from it all. I’m sorry.”
When Rex opened his mouth to ask what it meant, there was just an empty dial tone on the other end of the phone. He hoped his plea had been enough.
“I’m sorry too,” he said into the empty telephone.
* * *
As Rosie pressed the phone into the receiver, she knew everything that her ex-husband just said was true. She could taste it in her tears and feel it in her heart. Because, for months now, sadness had been seeping out of her every pore. In every moment of every day.
And it was relentless.
And it spilled all over everyone and everything around her.
And it was too much for her babies to soak up. She knew they had already become saturated with her sadness. Especially Willow. And Rex was right, it wasn’t fair at all. She had to be better. But she couldn’t be better.
Because early in her sadness, Rosie had the sense that it could dry up. That if she cried enough tears, released enough pain, that eventually there might be none left. So she would allow herself days and days crying in her room. Sometimes within moments of Willow and Asher smiling at her feet, she would poise herself for happiness. She would dry her eyes and try to put on some red lipstick. She would pull out a sparkly vest or play “Little Red Corvette” as loudly as her speakers would go. But no matter what, it was always straight back to sadness. Straight back to listlessness.
Rosie knew, and so did her children, that her sadness was an endless repository. Her sadness rose up in her faster than she could pour it out. And the more that sadness flowed out of her, the more sadness had filled up inside of her. She was drowning in it. And her kids were too.
The more she felt sad, the more she retreated to her room. And the more she retreated to her room, the more Vicodin pills she swallowed. And the more Vicodin pills she swallowed, the more guilt she felt. And the more guilt she felt, the more she felt sad. And the more she felt sad, the more she retreated to her room.
Rosie knew Rex was right. She needed help. She needed it if she wanted to survive.
So as she admitted herself to Clareton Rehab Center, she thought about the vicissitudes of her whole life. With those little white pills and everything else. She wanted to rid herself of them.
And in meeting after meeting, counseling session after counseling session, she described how there was so much love and then none of it. So much life and then none of it. How she had already hurt Rex so badly with her ups and downs. How she couldn’t bear the idea of hurting her children with it too. How she couldn’t keep filling up her children with love, and then draining them of it. How she couldn’t keep allowing them to absorb her love. And then her sadness. And then her love again. And then her sadness again. It would hurt them too much.
She explained that she never intended for it to happen that way, but it did. That she saw the future for her children in which she filled them with love, and then wrung them out with sadness over and over and over again. That it was so unfair to them. So, so unfair. Mothers were supposed to mitigate their children’s ups and downs. Not cause them.
She asked, begged, for help getting rid of the ups and downs. But it was right there at Clareton Rehab Center, in meeting after meeting, and counseling session after counseling session, that she realized she would always be this way. She wished she wasn’t but she was.
She wished she hadn’t spent her whole life loving something, and then hating it. Wearing it every Saturday night and then letting it sit in the back of her closet. Eating it every day for lunch and then never again. Going there every afternoon and then, all of a sudden one day, avoiding it entirely. Loving Rex so much, and then withdrawing from him. Filling Willow and Asher with her life, and then wringing them dry.
She wished she had never tried those pills. She wished she had never had those pills again. She wished she’d had the strength to move back to New York. She wished she had never had those pills again. She wished she could resist the temptation to contact the dealer who made it so easy to buy more pills whenever she thought she had resolved to stop. Again and again and again.
Rosie wished she could take her whole life back so that she could be a better mother now.
She wished she could be helped. But all of this was just part of the pattern. A pattern of being away at rehab or stoned behind a locked bedroom door. Over, and over again. A hopeless pattern of up and down and up and down. In and out of pills. In and out of happiness. In and out of rehab.
Her children needed to be loved in a way that was steady. Steady and sustainable. Her children needed to be loved in a way that was better than the way she could love. They needed to be loved by Rex. And Rex alone. She felt an overwhelming certainty that Rex was with Willow and Asher now. Protecting them, caring for them. Bringing them happiness. What a relief it must be for her children to find that peace without her.
Rosie knew she needed to be out of this terrible cycle.
She knew all these things as simple truths.
And so Rosie stood up with more energy, more conviction, than she had stood up with in months. And she walked out of Clareton Rehab Center. And straight back to her bedroom.