This Is Not my Life

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

Just before my son Austen was born, Mark and I bought a video camera, so that we could document each special moment of his new life. Of course, the milestones, like Austen, were quirky: giving his earliest smiles to a beloved bottle of hand lotion, refusing to eat his first (or any subsequent) birthday cake, typing words on the computer before he could say them, lining up dozens of Matchbox cars and counting them, writing math problems on his MagnaDoodle. There are hours and hours of videos ranging from delightful to dull, but there is one video, taken back in 2003, that is so painful just to think about that I fear ever watching it.

I was immensely pregnant with my daughter around the time the video was taken. My husband had lost his job and we had no income. I (being immensely pregnant) couldn't start looking for work right then and my husband was having a hard time finding work. We burned through the savings we had set aside for just such an emergency, and started living on credit (which was the beginning of our financial end and created problems that last to this day). My son was two-and-a-half and not yet speaking. We had just completed an emotionally exhausting series of evaluations that would eventually lead to a diagnosis of autism, but at that time, we simply knew that he showed significant enough developmental delays to qualify for early intervention services. And then, in the midst of all this, I discovered my husband was a sex addict and had been unfaithful to me both during and prior to our marriage.

I don't really remember -- don't want to remember -- how I got through that time. I know I stayed up nights crying and didn't get much sleep. I know that Mark got a job not long after his disclosure and that days were long and hard and lonely at home with Austen. (Of course, I think days would have been long and hard and lonely with Mark there too.)

One evening, at the end of another of those draining, painful days, Austen started crying in little fits that would come and go. I couldn't quite tell if he was tired or sick or in pain, and he couldn't tell me. It seemed as if his diaper was uncomfortable, but when I checked it, it was clean and dry. I didn't know what was wrong, if anything. But I knew that he was not happy, and that his unhappiness was wearing away at the gossamer thin strands that were holding my life together. At one point, he began crying in earnest: clinging to my leg, wanting me -- for what seemed like the hundredth time that day -- to pick him up and comfort him. And I couldn't. I was exhausted and frustrated, horribly anguished and hugely pregnant, and I just couldn't pick him up and hold him. So, he pulled on my leg and screamed and screamed as I looked down at him and cried and cried.

I felt that Death was looming near me, that I really would not live through this. So, I picked up our video camera, which was sitting on a shelf within reach, and I aimed it down at Austen's red, wailing face, as he stomped and thrashed, still clinging to my leg. And I said, over and over, between my own sobs, "This is not my life. This is not my life. This is not my life." It wasn't. This was not the way things were supposed to be. I wasn't supposed to have a husband who cheated on me and a marriage that was falling apart. I wasn't supposed to be powerless to help or comfort my child.

So, the tape rolled on the two of us sobbing, one on camera and one off. I thought when I died -- as I surely would -- that video would be the note I left behind in my despair. But I didn't die. I kept breathing. I cried myself out. I eventually put down the camera, scooped up Austen and took him to the pediatrician, who diagnosed him with a hernia and sent us off to the emergency room to see a surgeon. Mark met us there and sat down next to me on one of the hard plastic chairs in the waiting room. I let my head fall onto his shoulder and hid my eyes in his shirt as he held Austen on his lap and we waited.