Four years ago today I was recovering from a three-week solo van trek through the Southern California mountains during CoVid in wild fire season. I had intended to edit footage of that trip into a video series close upon my return and would have done so but for an MS flare-up, caused by a nervous breakdown, triggered by the discovery that my attorney in the suit against my homebuilder had so mishandled my case, I would have to start from scratch with a new attorney and chalk-up to collateral damage the $50K I had paid Shannon over the two years since the roof started leaking the week I moved in.
It took another four years, but I am happy to report that with the assistance of Attorney Bryan Swaim at Bordin Semmer, the lawsuit has finally been resolved in my favor. Attorney’s fees were not part of the settlement, but I have the funds to rebuild my home.
My XDH too has paid an acceptable percentage of what he still owed me. Enough to cover my expenses for the lawsuit, losses to Shannon, and costs of planting the courtyard garden and trees that have been so necessary for my healing.
The Ol’ MS is officially back in remission, mitochondria firing on all cylinders, and I have fine-tuned my Remission Protocol, discovered online self-healing guides who teach the practices I downloaded directly, and am finally ready to start sharing this story.
During what I will refer to as The Apartment Years, I was both the saddest and the happiest I had ever been in my then-46 years. In spite of the heartbreak and betrayal, the complete loss of everything that gave me purpose and joy, I knew I had a choice to make and that choice boiled down to this: “You can laugh hysterically or you can cry hysterically, but only one of those has a happy ending.”
For sure I did my share of crying, my corneas warping from the pressure of crying so hard and so long my eyeballs turned inside out. I didn’t use tissues. I used paper towels. The super absorbent kind. I bought them in bulk.
But when I wasn’t crying I loved and pampered myself. I made the most of the luxurious amenities offered at The Palazzo East by The Grove, where I was now living alone in a three bedroom penthouse apartment I had planned to live in with my youngest daughter – the extra bedroom being for her father or sister to sleep over, the amenities and security of the Penthouse floor because I had anticipated getting a job as soon as possible and wanted Audrey to have safe and easy access to the gym, pool and spa when I was at work.
It was a big investment, and it was a decision I made before I had any concept that I would have neither the ability nor, thankfully, the need to work during or after the divorce. The arrangement I made with XDH was that the apartment expenses would come out of my half of our personal assets, which I believed to be a fraction of what they were. It was a gift I chose to give my daughters and myself because long before I heard of Abraham Hicks or could have put it into words, I understood that Joy is a portal to the Vortex where our highest potential awaits us. I refused for a moment to believe that my leaving was anything less than an abidance to my Higher Self, who refused to let me set an example of the acquiescent, self-sacrificing wifelette for my daughters. If, as grown women, they came to me with my story, I would have told them that to stay with a person they had come to fear and loath, because it gave them a comfortable lifestyle, was not only selling themselves short, it was completely inauthentic. I had to stand in my Truth, even if it meant losing them in the short term. I had to have Faith in abundance. I had to believe in a different happy ending than the one that had just been expunged.
Alas, after seventeen years of full-time motherhood, how to be joyful with zero responsibilities? How to get through a day, a week, a month, a year, with no one else’s schedule or needs acting as the scaffolding for my life? I would have to become my own number one priority, my own best parent. Hmmm, I always said I wanted to have me as a Mom. Was this my chance?
You can take the mom out of the homeschool, but you can’t take the homeschool out of the mom. I hatched a plan. I would conduct a real-life embodiment of a thought experiment shared by women and caretakers everywhere: What would happen if I focussed all the care and love I had been giving to everyone else on just one person: Me? What would happen if I refused to despair, and instead made the utmost of my time and situation? What would happen if I chose to laugh instead of cry?
With nowhere else to go, I laughed and sang and danced my way straight into my Vortex, where my every word and deed seemed charmed. The Universe and all that is good within it conspired and colluded to create a magical world that touched my every encounter. For the first time in my life I knew no fear. I refused to silence myself, to be any smaller than I felt. I stopped apologizing (although I have only recently stopped apologizing for not apologizing). I started using my voice, expressing my anger, standing up for myself. I did Pure Barre, swam, hiked, sang, meditated, sketched, fell asleep in the sun. But most of all I danced. I danced and danced and danced in that 2000 square foot apartment with bamboo floors, 20 foot ceilings and mirrors everywhere.
I came to sense my own powerful presence and to experience an unfamiliar comfort in my body. I learned the sustaining power of righteous anger as an uninhibited tidal wave of all that I came here to be, experience and express carried me through two years of contentious divorce negotiations. My five pound, deaf service dog nursed my CNS through the cognitive dissonance brought on by this new perspective on the man I had chosen to make babies with.
Strangers stopped me on the street to say “I LOVE your energy!!” People close to me wanted to know my secret.”I don’t KNOW!” I said. “But I’m gonna figure it out and write a blog about it!” Because Ginger (who went with me everywhere including divorce-court) was God’s mic-drop on cuteness, I was never lonely. Everyone wanted to stop and pet her. When they asked what I was doing in LA, with a laugh and a smile I said, ” I found the money my ex-husband was hiding and now I’m writing a blog about it! It’s called Single and Hungry AF because he didn’t like me to swear.” I made a lot of friends.
To Shay Dempsey, the fabulous hairdresser and future friend the Universe found for me on Yelp my first month in LA, I said, “I don’t know how I go from being this deeply traumatized deer in flight, to the person who eloquently shares her story to inspire and support others, but I am SO excited to find out, and THAT is the story I will be telling when I reach the other side.”
So here I am. On the Other Side. I spent seven years in the cycle of the Phoenix, burning down and rising up, burning down and taking flight again. I never lost sight of my original intention to tell this story, so I wrote and recorded everything as I refined the process of using conscious presence to fly back to my Vortex and, ultimately, to master the art of creating there full time.