I hate keeping secrets. Like my job, I am generally very good at doing it but sometimes it makes me want to tear my hair out and/or crawl in a hole and hide. When things are trapped in your head and you can’t let them out, you can feel horribly, desperately alone. This is why PostSecret is such a huge success. Send in your secret and breathe a sigh of relief. There. You got it out. The world knows the secret and since you have shared and others have shared their secrets with you, you’re not alone.

Do you ever find yourself in a situation that you can only discuss a problem with one particular person? Maybe your other friends will judge, maybe they won’t understand, maybe they’re not close enough friends or are too close to someone else involved. Maybe you can tell some, even most of the story to other friends but you have to keep some parts secret. But the whole thing, unedited?

What if you can’t fit it on a postcard, or anonymous mail-in confessions aren’t your thing? Then you need that someone, that very specific friend.

That person is detached enough from the situation to be able to help you keep perspective. That person is close enough and trustworthy enough that you can tell the whole thing and empty out your heart. That person will let you be upset and hurt and cranky and not try to make everything better. Because that person knows he can’t make everything better – he can just hold you for awhile and hand you kleenex when you’re teary and pillows to punch when you’re angry. All he can really do is remind you to breathe.

That person is strong enough to catch you and not crumble. He doesn’t try to cheer you up or make you forget about things; he respects that you feel what you feel. He won’t belittle your worries or your fears. He won’t force you to be happy, but he’ll offer to share his happiness with you, not as a distraction from your troubles but as means of coping. And remember: if you will share and someone will share with you, you’re not alone.

But it can be hard to remember that you’re not alone when you really are physically alone. Right now, no one can hug me or hand me tissues or even look me in the eye and say it’s okay to be upset. No one is here but me. So I just have to remember that someone shook me out of bed today and said we were going to the zoo, and we saw a lion climb up a tree and an angry ostrich chase a giraffe and a zebra rolling on his back in the dirt.  He didn’t take me there to mean “Don’t worry about your troubles, they’re not important, just look at this instead.” He meant “I know you’ve been feeling weak. I want you to feel good so you feel stronger. Let’s have a beautiful day.”

So even though he’s not here right now and an alone-ish feeling is creeping in around my edges, even though I know he’ll never read this:

Thanks, E. I wouldn’t have made it through these days without you.

Who hears your secrets?

On Tim’s porch, talking about his dad who is still in the hospital more than 2 weeks after open heart surgery and JUST got off the ventilator, about Ben and Mel, about his lack of job, my hate of job, and recently resuscitated relationships.

“Thanks again for coming over. I didn’t really know who else I could talk to. My brothers are all screwed up and worried about my dad, and I’m still mad at my brother and I can’t lean on Ben for anything because he needs to lean on me and there’s just… it just sucks.”

He leans his head on my shoulder and sighs. I put my arm around him and give him a little hug. “It’s okay. I’m here if you need to talk.”

“It means a lot to me that you came. I don’t know what my problem is tonight… like I’m usually dealing with it all okay, but I don’t know… this helps.”

“It happens. You’ve got a lot of stuff piling up right now. But you know I’m here for you.”

Pause for a moment. He lifts his head from my shoulder and turns his face toward mine.

“Your hair smells good.”

“Quit trying to kiss me.”

“But…”

“Uh-uh.”

Well, honestly.

At my psychiatrist’s office, after spending most of my appointment filling her in on stuff with E, with Tim, divorce drama, job-hating, and general angst – I am leaving and realize I’ve forgotten something.

“Doctor?”

“Yes?”

“I forgot to tell you something kind of important.”

“Do you need more of your prescriptions?”

“No, but… that whole not-drinking thing we talked about last time? It’s not working so well. I mean, I’m not getting rip-roaring drunk anymore, I only have, like, two glasses of wine or two beers, but still, with my medicines…”

She scribbles something on her notepad and waves me out. “Don’t worry about it. You have enough going on.”

Ooookay then. Cheers!

Driving home with E after spending 2 hours at the bar, listening to him ramble on about his various family troubles, his brother out of work and broke, his mom just out of rehab, and doing the best I can to advise him on the mess that is his gene pool.

“I lurve you,” he slurs. He’s had a few.

“I love you too, hon.”

“No, I REALLY love you. I wanna spend the rest of my life with you.”

“That’s nice, babe. We’ll talk about that a little more when you’re sober.”

Hold that thought, E. For like, a year.

I broke down and called Tim the other day. He had to be in the same position I was in and I had become determined that we present a united front to keep this as painless as possible.

“I’m worried about Ben,” I say.

“Well yeah, it’s not like this is easy for him.”

“I know, but he’s been calling me two or three times every day and that just seems a little excessive.”

“Really?” he says incredulously. “That much a day?”

“Uh-huh. Has he been calling you a lot?”

“Yeah but I didn’t think he’d be calling you so much, ‘cause you and Melissa…” He trails off. “I mean, you’re kind of on her side, right?”

“Let’s not get into sides here,” I say quickly. “You and I both want to be there for both of them. Ben’s just going so back and forth, like one minute he calls me and he’s so sad and then he calls again and he’s so hopeful and then he calls AGAIN and he’s all paranoid about something she did or said. Is he like that with you?”

“Well, yeah.”

“Tim, I just don’t know what to tell him anymore. False hope is the worst thing right now, you know? And how do you reassure the guy without making him hopeful?”

“I haven’t been able to figure that out either,” he sighs. “Cause I know Melissa, and you know Melissa, and she doesn’t back down.”

I laugh a little. “She’s a tough cookie. I’d be surprised if she changed her mind.”

“Heh, everyone would. But this building up hope thing, I don’t know. I mean, I don’t want to encourage that either. You and me both know it isn’t gonna happen, but he hasn’t come to grips with it yet.”

We talk for awhile, trying and failing to come up with any strategy other than just listening and trying to talk as little as possible when he calls, just to let him vent. I just want to make sure Tim and I are on the same page, both of us helping Ben in the same direction and not making him any more conflicted than he already is. The guy is understandably confused and sad and generally messed-up right now – who wouldn’t be? He and so many people, Tim included, are still in the stage where they’re asking over and over:

“Why?”

“I think I understand why,” I tell him. “And that’s only because in a small way, I’ve kind of been in her shoes. With my ex-fiance. And I think that’s a hard thing to explain to people. Not a lot of people understood why I left him either. But that’s a long story.”

“Some of the guys think she was cheating on him.”

“Probably because that’s a simple reason. Cheating, abuse, stuff like that, everyone GETS that. It’s just that emotional stuff and the things going on inside that are hard to explain. That’s what I was trying to tell MIL the other day.”

“Wait, when did you see her?”

Melissa’s mother-in-law (MIL) is what my own mother would call “a piece of work.” She’s never been anything but nice to me, but sometimes she’s a bit…off… and I know that’s caused no small amount of tension between her and the family sometimes. She and Mel have butted heads a number of times over so many things, so MIL is obviously in something of a state about this separation thing.

“Last weekend. I was out in the county doing some shopping and I was right by their house so I dropped by to say hi to her and FIL.”

The father-in-law was always closer to Melissa than MIL ever was. He’s the sort of guy who, with all his crass flirting and antics, would be creepy and inappropriate if only he weren’t such a not-creepy guy at heart. You’d try and sue him for sexual harassment if you could only stop thinking it’s all just straight up funny. FIL and Mel were fishing buddies, cigar-smoking buddies. I was kind of sad he wasn’t there when I stopped by, but it ended up that MIL was enough to handle.

“Um, why did you do that?”

“They adopted me into their family same as they adopted you,” I point out. “And circumstances being what they are, I figure I’m not going to be seeing them as much so I wanted to go by and say hello. It seemed like the right thing to do.”

“Okaaay…”

“Anyway, MIL is hung up on the ‘why why why’ thing too and she’s kinda saying the same stuff you guys are.”

“She thinks Melissa cheated on him?”

“YOU don’t think that, do you?”

“No. but I know her better than a lot of the guys do.”

“I don’t think MIL really thinks that deep down. She just got all sarcastic at one point and said things like ‘Oh, of course Ben must have BEAT her or been a TERRIBLE father’ and I told her to calm down because she knew it wasn’t true. But she went on like ‘or Melissa must have had some sort of AFFAIR,’ and when she went off with that I kind of kicked her.”

“You KICKED her?”

“I sort of nudged her foot with mine to get her to shut up. Maybe I nudged a little harder than necessary.” He starts to laugh. “But my point is that those are the answers that are easy, those are the ones people can GET. Like she would rather have Mel break her son’s heart by cheating on him instead of having her recognize an emotional split and leave before it gets godawful.”

“I guess.”

The easy answers would have been the most hurtful. Yeah, she could have cheated on him and smashed his heart into a million pieces. They could have fought like cats and dogs and both left bitter and hateful. It could be so much worse than it really is, but it seems that at the root of it all, it’s the horrible stuff we really understand. You don’t have to be unfaithful or have had an unfaithful partner to understand that cheating can destroy a relationship. You don’t need to be abusive or be abused to see why couples in those situations separate.

Anyone who’s watched COPS or Cheaters can tell you why those people split up. They’re a little nuts to begin with, and then they go batshit crazy on each other on TV and we laugh and say “good riddance” to the cheating/abusive/criminal/generally evil spouse. Then they end up on Judge Judy six months later.

But what happens when the couple in question is neither abusive nor unfaithful, but instead is well-adjusted, college-educated, middle-class, and gainfully employed?

They’ll never be on a tacky TV show. They will eventually share holidays and work together to make a secure future for their son. Ben and Melissa won’t have an acrimonious court battle over child support and who gets the blue dual-recliner couch and the plastic Jesus. They will do this the well-adjusted, college-educated, middle-class, gainfully-employed way. And one day, Ben will accept that it’s over and he will move on. One day, he will stop feeling guilty for thinking he couldn’t give her what she needed. One day, I think he’ll be glad that it took him a long time to understand what happened, because the easy answers would have been more painful.

And then he’ll understand the ‘why,’ but most people never will.

This is a continuation of yesterday’s post: For worse, for better, for…whatever.

My phone actually rang twice, but it wasn’t until the end of the second missed call that I heard it. I slide my feet off E’s lap and retrieve it from the study.

“Uh-oh,” I say, walking back into the living room.

“What?”

“Two missed calls.” I point at the phone. “Melissa a few minutes ago. Ben just now.”

“I wonder what it is,” he says, twisting his mouth into a frown.

“They had their first marriage counseling thing tonight,” I remind him, flipping the phone open to dial Melissa. “It looks like it did not go well.”

Mel doesn’t pick up and I leave her a quick voicemail. I try Ben next, and he answers with the same small, broken voice he used when he first told me she was leaving. “She doesn’t want to work on it,” he says. “She doesn’t even want to try. It’s completely over.”

I can’t pretend that I didn’t know this would happen, so I make some sort of mumbly noises as he continues, telling me what she said that clued him in to the fact that there really is no chance. I’m shocked that he says these things, not because I didn’t expect him to tell me what went on, but because she’d told me before that she didn’t intend to tell him certain details. “Some of these things could be really hurtful to him,” she’d told me over lunch one day. “I’m leaving and that’s going to hurt him enough, I don’t want to tell him things that will just make it worse.” She was right. So now it’s worse.

I don’t have time to reply to Ben before he says he has to go and hangs up the phone quickly. Sitting back down next to E on the couch, I snuggle into his arm. “Bad, huh?” he asks.

I tell him what was said.

“Ouch,” he says, eyes wide. “Really. OUCH.”

“Yeah.”

My phone beeps with a new text message. It’s Mel, asking if we can meet up and go somewhere to chat. “You don’t mind, do you?” I ask E, even though I know what his answer will be – had BETTER be. “I know we planned to spend the evening together but – “

“Go, baby,” he says gently. “I’ll wait here. You need to be with her right now.”

I slide over and smoosh into his lap, dropping a kiss on his cheek. “Thank you, honey.” He kisses me back. “This sort of simple thing, this is what I need from you. Just understanding when things are hard for me too.”

E hugs me close for a moment. “I know. And I’d never tell you not to go. It’s going to be okay.” I text Mel back, telling her to come pick me up whenever she’s ready, and I go to pack. “What are you getting?” he asks as I head into the kitchen.

“I am getting what is necessary for an evening like this,” I announce, opening the fridge. “I knew there was a reason I saved this thing!” Shoving the bottle and two plastic cups into my (fabulous) new Juicy Couture satchel, I head back out to the living room to wait for her.

“What did you get?” I hold up the Polka Dot Riesling, mine and Melissa’s favorite, and make a pouty face. E frowns at me. “Honey…”

“Pleeeeease.”

“I won’t tell you what to do,” he says resignedly. “This quitting drinking idea was all you, so it’s your decision.”

“Just tonight, it’ll only be tonight. We’ll sit in the park and drink like winos and bond over our troubles and I will come home to you safe and sound.” I hear her car in my driveway and tuck the bottle back in my bag. “Bye, sweetie – I’ll call you if we’re gonna be late or when I know what’s going on.” He just smiles and shakes his head.

I get into the car and immediately pull the plastic cups from the parish picnic out of my bag and plop them in the cupholders. “What are those – “ Mel asks, then sees me reach for the wine. “Woo!” she squeals as I twist the cap off (yeah, it’s the classy kind) and pour us each half a cup. I take a long swallow of mine, savoring the sweetness that is all the sweeter because it’s forbidden.

“All right,” I said. “I talked to him and he told me what you said. And you said you weren’t going to tell him those things – but now you did. What the heck happened?”

“I just… it just came out. It was just something I had to say.” I ask why, what had changed since she said she didn’t want to hurt him with harsh facts. “It started off with the counselor asking us questions,” she said, taking sips from her cup. “Mmm, this is good. But anyway, he was asking us questions and so we were talking to him, and then it really just came to a point where we were talking back and forth to each other and not to the counselor.”

I nod, almost sloshing wine down my jacket as she turns onto the main road. “Did he specifically ASK you about that?” I wonder aloud.

She sighs. “Kind of. But not.” We let it go at that and sip the wine, stopping for a refill at a stoplight. She abruptly lurches right. “Let’s get chocolate martinis!”

Breaking no-drinking vow? In for the penny, in for the pound. This is all about solidarity.

In the Applebee’s parking lot (I told you, we’re classy girls), we park among three cop cars and keep working on the bottle of Riesling, giggling about nothing and saving the crucial conversation for the hard liquor.

“Hi, can I help you ladies with—“

“Two chocolate martinis,” she says quickly. When they land on our table, we swirl the chocolate syrup from the bottom with our straws. “Now,” she says, turning to me mischievously, “now we can talk.”

“Okay. So you told him. WHY?”

“I was mad.”

“And…?”

She sighs and savors a hefty sip of chocolatey goodness. “Bek, he was SO condescending! Said that I could move out, be on my own and just ‘get it out of my system’ like it was some sort of phase, and he insisted that I’d get over this ‘independence thing’ and come back home and be a family again.” I sip and nod in agreement. Ohhhh, the chocolate is making me happy. “It’s like he didn’t take me seriously, like he just had to humor me for a few months and then I’d get over it. Like I hadn’t thought this through already, like I couldn’t possibly make a decision and stick to it.”

“Well, he wants to give you space, Mel, he doesn’t want to pressure you to try and stay right now because that would obviously be counterproductive…”

“I don’t know, it was just the way he said it, like he was treating me like a child, saying ‘Go, go, you’ll be back’ and I KNOW I’m not going back and frankly, I want him to know that. I didn’t know how else to get it through his head.”

“So you told him.”

“So I told him.”

Long, slow swallows of chocolate. Oh, so good. We look at each other and I can tell she’s asking me not to judge her and she can tell I’m trying not to. “I guess you did what you had to do,” I say finally. “I guess it’s kind of like what I did with Bear.”

“You told him the same thing?”

“No. I felt the same thing. I never said it. I couldn’t bring myself to tell a man who loved me, who I loved but was not in love with anymore, that I was no longer emotionally or physically attracted to him. He would have blamed himself for everything that was wrong instead of blaming me, and I was the one who deserved the blame for what went wrong with us.”

“I had to tell him. It just came out.” She signals the waiter for another round of martinis. Tasty drinks are dangerous like that. “But I can’t be stuck in a marriage like that, a marriage where I have to fake the most important things. I’ve been trying Bek, I have, but I can’t fake it anymore.”

“I faked it with Bear sometimes. And I loved him, but we were never super great at… that. But we were practically kids. I thought it would get better.”

“Yeah well, we’ve been together for ten years.”

“But don’t tell me you’ve been faking ten years. That’s not true and you know it and I don’t believe it. You guys have had great times, don’t just write those off because the last six months or a year have been rough. I mean, come on, how many times have you told me how much you love your husband, how you guys have such a great sex life and all that? I mean, walk out of this if you want to but don’t say there was never anything good there.”

She covers her face with her hands as though that will magically make the next round of martinis appear, and then peeks at me through her fingers like a child. “Maybe I wasn’t always telling the whole truth.”

“MEL!” I lean across the table at her. “What the heck?” The waiter brings the martinis and we mumble “thank you” in unison and I get back in her face. “Why would you lie about that? It’s not like I ever just came up and asked you about your sex life, so why even bring it up and brag on it?” And why is everybody lying about being in love these days anyway?

“Because it sounded better than the truth.”

At this we grab greedily at the martinis, both of us feeling the buzz off the wine and the first round. “And the truth, then?” I probe.

“The truth is I don’t know if I should have gotten married so young. Or to him at all. And I did love him and I wanted to make that commitment to him but… Bek, I’m just done. It felt like it could be the right thing at the time but I can see now that it’s not.”

I drink because I’m not sure what to say. So much of this draws me back five years to the wedding I was supposed to have just one month before Melissa’s, to the relationship I ended before I could regret marrying the wrong guy, marrying too young, and having to fake the most important things in life. This could have been me. I have a strong suspicion that it WOULD have been me, with a husband, a baby, a job, and an unshakable feeling of claustrophobia and regret.

I remember my friend Bella, on leaving a marriage begun when she was only 21 or 22, went right out and launched into an affair with someone she said she felt more connected to than she had to her husband for a long time. God, she was funny when she went back into the dating world, going on and on about how this guy understood her and listened to her, and by the way, was extremely well-endowed and knew what to do with it. It was Bella like I’d never seen her before, high on her new freedom and regrets be damned. It’s what I did when I ended my engagement – well, minus the super well-endowed guy.

During the third round, Mel asks about E and I tell her about the events of the last few days. We ponder the mess, what we’ve taken to calling the beautiful mess of our lives. “This is what it means to be a single girl,” I warn her.

I call E when we get back to the car, giddy from three martinis each. Mel doesn’t really want to go home, so we invite her in for awhile and the three of us sit on the porch and talk about her plans for getting a new apartment, getting furniture. Getting a future all her own.

After she leaves, E and I get ready for sleep. “What’s this?” I ask when I see the bubble bath out on the counter. “Were you getting pretty while I was gone?” I tease.

“I was going to make you a bubble bath.” He looks a tiny bit embarrassed and does not meet my eyes. “I thought you’d probably be all stressed. But,” he says, nipping at my waist, “you’re all sloshed and not stressed, so I think I’ll take you to bed instead.”

“Mmm, yes please.”

He’d even done the dishes.

Day Two, Lessons Learned:

• There are TWO Hiltons on Michigan Avenue.
• Remember to pack your crazy meds before you leave the hotel in the morning.
• Conferences are good because everyone is checking email on their phones, and therefore do not notice that you are Twittering or on AOL.
• Toyota won’t talk to you.

Day Two technically started at 4 am when I remembered that hideous conversation I blogged yesterday. I washed down two Excedrin with a swig of lukewarm Diet Pepsi and slept fitfully for two and a half more hours.

I was actually quite excited to get up and going on Thursday morning. It was my first conference ever, and I put on my lovely black Audrey Hepburn Breakfast-at-Tiffany’s dress with a soft little cardi and round-toe kitten heels. I was professional and fabulous.

Until I got to the lobby and realized my poster was upstairs in my room.

And had the cab take me to the wrong Hilton, sixteen blocks from where I needed to be.

And found out that the foundation that bestowed my conference grant had not paid the invoice for my registration fee.

And discovered I had no business cards in my work bag.

And realized that I was so distracted by my Hepburn fabulousness that I forgot to pack my anti-epiliptics in my little pill box before I left the hotel.

And noted that the complimentary breakfast buffet (at the correct Hilton) included neither sugar nor soda.

I made a mad dash down to the lobby and grabbed a Diet Pepsi and two Krispy Kremes from the coffee bar. Thus fortified, I went back upstairs, claimed a seat in the main conference room, and went out into the lounge to put up my poster: “Using Lean 6-3 to Work Smarter: Massive Transfusion Protocol” (you’re on the edge of your seat, I know). Mine was the biggest and shiniest poster in the room, and with a sinking feeling in my stomach I realized that meant it would probably attract the most attention.

The nervous stomach feeling was compounded by the jitters I get when I don’t have my medicine on time. The donuts and soda helped a bit, but I was sending rapid Twitters and texts to friends. I think my thumbs were shaking. Alone representing Dunder-Mifflin Hospital at the conference, I had to be the one speaking to the people who came to see my poster, and the list of attendees began to terrify me. Executives from Toyota – they invented the Lean processes I wrote about on my poster. Big names from Ford, Ritz-Carlton. Top brass from ThedaCare, Virginia Mason Medical Center, Mt. Sinai Hospital. The President Emeritus of the Joint Commission for Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations. The president of the Baldridge Association.

Crap.

The tension eased as the day progressed (thank you all for the reassuring Tweets and texts!) and I actually had a small moment of brilliance when one of the Toyota execs started asking about how we were using Lean to improve clinical outcomes, not just operational processes. That was ALL ME. He came and looked at my poster during the break and I talked about the revolutionary new ways we were using Lean processes to improve patient outcomes (in this case, providing product to alleviate massive hemorrhages where people need their whole blood volume replaced in about 5 minutes, yummy stuff). He nodded and mumbled with a very thick Japanese accent, something that sounded like “very good” (I’m optimistic), then took out his little digital camera and started clicking away at every section of my poster.

I guess that was good. Toyota invented this stuff, and since he didn’t interrogate me or rip my poster up, I’m okay with that.

I won’t bore you with any more conference details aside from the fact that the chicken served at lunch gave me a most uncomfortable stomach, and I left before the last session of the day.

It was beautiful outside, warm but not disgustingly so, and I opted to skip the taxi and walk back to my hotel via the Magnificent Mile. I paused in front of Tiffany’s in my Audrey dress and wished I had another donut. I crossed the bridge and looked at the cars on the lower road and said in my best Elwood voice: “Yep, this is definitely Lower Wacker Drive!” My kitten heels were aching along with my stomach by the time I made it back to my hotel, but no matter. I gulped my medicine down greedily and set about preparing to meet a blog friend for the first time.

That’s right, I had never met a reader before.

Jenn happened to be in town before leaving for Spain, and we’d made plans to meet up for dinner. I’d never met the chick before and when we saw each other we hugged like friends. Reading each other’s personal blogs meant we weren’t strangers – hell, I was just glad she wasn’t some psycho stalker who hacked the real Jenn’s email and was all set up to kill me and toss me in the river. Call it a pleasant surprise. We walked in no particular direction, looking for food and winding up at the House of Blues (which, for the record, does not have Bud Select either), chatting so long before even looking at the menus that I think the waiter got a bit tired of checking on us.

She and I knew the surface of a lot of each other’s stories already and laughed and screeched “Oh my God!” every time more details spilled out. We talked about boys like girls at a sleepover, about exes and crushes and the ones who were mistakes.

“I just pretended to pass out,” I said.

“What?”

“I think he wanted to – you know – and I didn’t, so I pretended that I’d just had too much to drink and passed out.”

“That’s a good way to get out of it.”

I’m glad SOMEBODY approves of me.

And so I made a friend who exists in the real world, without posts and tweets and texts. We were getting geared up for the Chicago Blogger Meet-Up the following night, where we’d both be meeting more people we’d never seen outside our monitors.

Day Two wrapped up in much the same fashion as Day One, in a happy tipsy haze, minus the middle-of-the-night what-have-I-done freakout. (This time it was more of a Jenn-is-great-but-the-rest-of-these-people-COULD-be-psychos freakout.) But really, psychos or not, the blogger ladies give me something to look forward to during the next day of the conference. They promised me pizza.