Love is not enough to make a relationship work. It’s just not.
And I know, I know: the romantics out there would say to me: What in the world are you talking about? Love can only be enough.
But…..this is what I know: Love is just not enough.
I know this at a visceral, core-of-my-being.
Love is not enough.
You cannot love someone into living into their potential. You cannot love someone into actually trying. You cannot love someone into helping them to become a functional human being.
Love is just not enough. At all.
I’ve written at length about one core traumatic relationship, and another I write about hardly at all.
Why?
Because it is that painful.
Because that is the reason I know love is never enough.
If love were enough, I would not spend my days these days knowing there is a high likelihood that someday, there is a very high likelihood that someone I loved once upon a time will end up in a pauper’s unmarked grave, with no one to claim a body. There will be no obituary; there will be no one who was once close to him to know he is gone.
I have spent thirty-one years mourning this person in slow-motion. I was fifteen years old when he old me that he was self-destructive; about his chosen method of ending things; and the only thing keeping him from acting on his urge was the idea of me standing over his coffin, crying.
Love is not enough.
Fifteen year old me did not know that when people are self-destructive you don’t just listen; you actively seek assistance for that person.
I will not stand over that person’s coffin someday because I will not be notified.
I worry a very realistic worry that no one will be notified. There may be no one to notify.
And yet, I’ve already done the mourning: I’ve mourned in real-time, in slow-motion, for thirty-one years now.
I’ve done the crying over his coffin, before it ever happens.
Thirty-one years is a long time to feel responsible for someone else’s life.
I was fifteen years old. Fifteen.
I couldn’t drive by myself yet.
Love is not enough.
It should have struck me as odd when he chose to not go to school when he graduated. I was prepared to break up; I remember the morning I told him it was okay if we saw other people; shortly after he graduated.
He didn’t go to school. He didn’t go to work.
It was nearly a full year before he told me he was waiting on me to graduate so we could go to school together.
Looking back, my response should have been, “You might have wanted to talk to me about that.”
I wish he had talked to me about that idea before he made that sort of decision.
It accomplished his aim; it’s how I ended up at Georgia State because he refused to entertain any other school ideas than the Art Institute of Atlanta.
I engineered my entire college choice around a guy. There was no choice. I applied nowhere else. I had options; I had no idea.
Love is not enough. If it were, then some level of appealing to his sense of ambition might have worked when both myself and his family attempted to convince him to avail himself of the tuition-free attendance that was available to him through his mother’s employment, to Emory.
I didn’t really realize I was in danger yet.
I should have realized I was in danger.
There were no hints of being afraid of him at all until I decided I wanted to be able to see other people.
That happened the first week of classes my Freshman year.
I went out for pizza with someone else and I remember being terrified to tell him.
There were hints, little warning signs I didn’t know to see at the time.
For instance, we started dating in late January of my first year of high school and for Valentine’s Day that year, despite the fact that we were barely saying two words to each other on the phone yet, he showed up to school with a giant gift bag full of gifts for Valetine’s Day: love-bombing.
Sometime around Christmas the next year we skipped a Christmas party and I knew my parents were out at their own Christmas party, so I showed him where we lived.
A few weeks later a rose was left on my car.
It was a full three years after my graduation before the gravity of the danger I was in showed in full-force: he was prepared to use lethal force on anyone who encroached on me, his possession. And a week later, he proved that he was willing to use my own fears against me, to compel me into staying by force when he felt me finally slipping through his fingers forever.
I firmly believe I would not be alive today had I stayed beyond that Spring of 2001.
The terror remains; the knowledge of his likely present circumstance is of little daily comfort. I have had two nightmares in the last week about this individual coming to hurt me. The knowledge that he likely doesn’t have the will or the means to come to my home are of little comfort.
I wake up in the night and exclaim, breathless, “JARED!” before I think about it, before I am awake even, to reach over to find my 2026 safe space exactly where he has been for the past twenty-one years. Jared, without fail, either reaches over for me or says, “I’m here,” without exhaustion for the repetition that doesn’t disappear year after year, seemingly decade after decade. He knows my ghost; he has met him face-to-face. Jared is unafraid.
And still, I am unsure which terror is stronger: the idea that this individual will potentially end up in a mass pauper’s grave someday, or the idea that he may show up to cause me or my family harm. Both are true: I am afraid of him, and I am afraid for him.
And whatever the trauma-bond, I still say there was love.
Jared and I are at Gallery Row, and Jared is engrossed in this work project he has been working on for at least a solid two weeks straight, and for once he was thrilled to call our date a “working date,” despite the fact that most of the time when I want to bring my laptop to Gallery Row to write, Jared says he doesn’t need his laptop; that he is happy to work off his phone.
Which, to understand that, Jared has a Google Pixel Fold, so he does actually have massive phone screen real estate when he wants to and needs it. And, arguably, he is one of the few people in this world who does, actually need it more often than not.
I am up to page 160 in “Bird by Bird” by Anne Lamott, the chapter called “Letters.”
The book is sort of quaint even if it is still applicable to a writer’s life; it is a little window into what being a writer in 1994 would have been like. It’s hard to remember that life really was like this in my early high school days. She talks about writing on her word processor. She talks about distractions like someone calling you on the phone, or random regular procrastination-like distractions. I would like to see how she would update this book to account for social media and texting and the level of arguably world-changing distractions we have in 2026.
I just finished the chapter on finding a writing partner and I like that idea and I do run what I write by Jared, but Jared isn’t really that invested in the work; he is invested in making sure I am happy. So his advice is mostly placating and “uh-huh, Sweetie, that is nice.”
I do actually have an ideal writing partner whose opinion on my work I would deeply respect, but that person is unavailalbe for a variety of reasons and likely not interested in the gig. So, I go at it alone other than Jared’s cursory glances at whatever I’ve written. I’ve suggested the prospect previously to the individual in question to crickets. Rejection is hard.
The truth is, I write to process my world. That’s the whole reason I write. The idea of writing fiction is wholly unappealing; I don’t really do well on letting things go in my history, obviously; either.
And the truth really is stranger than fiction, I’ve found, personally.
But sitting here in Gallery Row on a Saturday night instead of our usual Friday night, I am finding that I really am settling into being a boring, settled, middle-aged wife. And, I like it.
Last night was our semi-monthly Costco run and we might as well have been sitting at an upscale restaurant than that Brookhaven Costco, with me savoring that strawberry-vanilla swirl decadent ice cream under the flourescent lights and the umbrella over our table. The thing is, at age 46 I do lament so much of what happened in my high school and college years. It is easy from this vantage point to sit here and think “What in the world was I thinking?” in reference to a lot of different experiences and relationships and things I did willingly.
But, if I hadn’t actually participated in those relationships and experiences, would I have recognized the safety Jared represented in 2003? I’m really not sure I would have.
Jared had to tame me. I was really like a wild animal, with quaint belief systems and thoughts about how the world and relationshps should be.
Jared says he plays a long game. Sometimes he alters that to say he plays a “long, long game.”I don’t know that he could have predicted taming me would take 23 years of knowing me, though.
Jared would say he hasn’t tamed me at all. I don’t think he thinks I have mellowed with age.
And I wonder what 24-year old me would think of the past 22 years. My small social circle is entirely different. I have become a near-hermit after being a social butterfly in my early 20s. To be completely honest, it is a near-miracle that I survived my early 20s, on so many fronts.
It is a miracle for different reasons that I survived my 30s and early 40s, bringing two children to adulthood.
I think I have tamed quite a lot over the last 20 years, though. And encounters with a past individual and experiences involving that person over the last couple of years have made me grateful I was able to retreat to Jared’s safety at home, after exploring attempts at closure in one situation.
And I did get that closure, even if it didn’t look exactly like I thought it would.
I’m pretty sure it looks exactly like Jared thought it would though. He was never going to tell me what to do but he knew that person wouldn’t respect boundaries. I’m still grateful for the experiences anyway.
Now that I’m eight months out from last contact with that individual, it feels like a story I couldn’t have written as fiction any better. I’m really not sure why some people have self-destruct modes, or why some people’s self-destruct modes look wildly like incredible success on the outside.
But, I got an inner look to that person’s self-destruction in slow motion in an up-front seat during a couple of very abbreviated sessions, and I came away from the experiences feeling like why yes, karma is real, and the universe is one giant balancing act and equalizer.
And I am grateful the past played out the way it did, even the recent past.
The quiet after mass-blocks on all the drama-causing individuals from my past is rather jarring, though, and the room it leaves in my brain is like a vacuum that I am struggling to fill with anything other the ghosts of their stories.
The thing is, which ghosts to tell? In what order? There are so very many of them. Sometimes those ghosts wake me up in the night, prompting me to fold myself deeper into Jared. Sometimes they invade a sunny afternoon, prompting me to lose hours to doomscrolling because distraction is better than facing that there are stories begging to be told.
And then, because there are blocks and mutual decisions for forever silence between me and these people, I find there are things to say and I have no one to talk to but the ghosts. And Jared. And thankfully, Jared has yet to get tired of me saying these things.
But I say them to Jared in an effort to escape putting them into writing for the world, too. Because some of what I have floating around in my heart feels too big to capture. Too dangerous. Some of what I feel like saying feels like I might lose my very soul if I capture the truth of what I really think and feel in writing….the rage, the heartbreak, the sorrow, and yes, even the love that exists to this day.
Even if Jared says a more accurate term for the word “love” is to substitute more appropriately “trauma-bond.” I say it is overly-simplistic to reduce years’ worth of relationship dynamics to simple “trauma-bonds.” Life is not that neat, unfortunately. Life is not that simple even when entire relationships were built upon emotional manipulation by a suicidal individual who I was not equipped to help at age 15, and actual sexual assault in a dorm room at age 19, and actual captivity in the blackness of the night at age 21.
And even so, the universe is an equalizer. I see that in the ghosts I’ve blocked, and I see it in other ways in my daily life still present.
So, I try to be more present in my marriage on a daily basis. Periodically as I write this I glance up at this man I have known of for a couple of weeks’ shy of 23 years, and I love that I think I have mellowed and he is not so sure. I love that we have three children, two of whom are now adults now. I love that we are raising three very driven individuals who have goals and aspirations and dreams just like we have had.
I love that even though we will have no one at the high school in the Fall, we will still go to band practice on Thursday nights. I love that our youngest will want that.
I love that I have goals myself now, after so many years of feeling like literal wastes of space aside from the identity of mother.
I love that routine is in reach, it is taking its rudimentary forms even before life changes in ways it will never retreat back to, when both our big boys go off to college in the Fall.
And, I truly never thought I would be one of those women who, in my late 40s, finds herself thinking that she would never go backwards in life to experience younger days. But instead, I find myself excited about the future, excited about the current state of my marriage, and excited to spend more time getting to know my children as big kids and adults.
But, the ghosts are there. And there are stories to tell. And even if they are trauma loops, they are my trauma loops, and in processing them maybe there are kernels of wisdom; warnings for other women to maybe learn from so that we can all heal a little more than we are today.
Because what happens when one of those perpetrators goes on to wild success and no justice? What happens when I get confirmation that yes, even wealth does not buy morality or a heart or respect? What happens when I find out for sure that it has not bought that individual love or freedom?
What happens when another perpetrator goes on to near destitution and deep drinking and psychological problems? What if this person was someone you were sure you were going to marry, when they were your high school sweetheart and life was quaint and there were no real problems?
But….then…..there were no real problems for me aside from scoliosis and teenage angst and recent family tragedies. This person had to go work in a strip club on school nights, in the kitchen in Atlanta because his mother thought it was the best money he could make as an 18 year old.
What happens when I learn that maybe trusting my brain was never the problem? What if I just stop and realize that we’ve all done the best we could?
And the last two years, finding closure in myself with the wealthy individual, has taught me that some people just seek out drama and that person seeking out that drama isn’t always me. Some people are magnets for it.
And I know what is wrong with that person, too, because his childhood and coming of age was equally tragic, if more privileged: tragic for entirely different reasons.
And so, I do the best I can. And I look up at Jared occasionally, immersed in his coding project for work that has made him so invested in his work lately and energized, and I am grateful. I am grateful for my life, I am grateful for our children, I am grateful for our home, I am grateful that I imported this man from Nebraska who had never so much as stepped foot on Georgian soil before he came to see me for the first time in September of 2003. I am grateful that I got homesick in 2007 and came running back and I am grateful that my children have each gotten a stellar education.
I am grateful that we are weird people, that we have strange inside philosophical family jokes that probably make no sense to other people, I am grateful that our children like philosophy like we do, even if Jared and I do lean more easily into the theology-related philosophy than our children naturally do.
I am grateful that I can rant about my past, I can write, I can talk, I can cry. I can also say, “Sweetheart, I am spiraling,” and Jared will bring me back to the present in some way or other or encourage it as best I can let him at the time.
And so: there are nights like tonight, where we find ourselves at Gallery Row: each of us writing for entirely different reasons, each of us equally satisfied. I find no answers, I avoid talking to the ghosts another night, and all is well with the world.
In 2011, I qualified for SSDI at first application, without an attorney.
I started attempting to go back to work in 2018.
There have been lots of attempts to return to work at this point, all reported to the SSA.
I desperately want to NOT need SSDI. It is NOT fun. It is not an aspiration.
They know I have the photography business; I have applied for all kinds of jobs that weren’t ideal fits in desperate attempts to find any sort of employment that would allow myself to work off SSDI.
I have lost count of how many reviews I have been through, including one in-depth but many more shorter ones. Each one, it is utterly depressing to receive the letter saying my disability is continuing.
I found my original documentation not long ago. My situation was not expected to improve over time, back in 2011.
I am not a good judge as to whether it is improving on one day or another.
Ultimately, i do think I am more stable than I was in 2011.
And some days, like the day I wrote that post recently about getting the house in order, I do feel like I am getting my life in order.
And yet, I would absolutely love nothing more than for some employer to take a chance on me.
After 15 years, it feels hopeless.
And so, I have turned to volunteering as an outlet. I console myself that I have my wonderful church groups. I have mostly even given up on marketing the photography business because despite loving it, I am not a profitable photographer; I don’t have the business sense to make it work full-time and at 46 years old, I no longer have the stamina. I have spent embarrassingly amounts more on attempting to have a photography business; exponentially more than the small little amount I did ever make. I have one wedding on the calendar at this point, slightly less than a year from now, and nothing else on my calendar.
And, I do write, and I publish the posts I write here to a blog, but I have never quite felt like I was able to be profitable as a writer or blogger either, despite that being a long-term dream, too. I do not even know where to begin to actually become a profitable blogger or writer. I write because writing publicly is an extension of the journaling I have done since I was eight years old.
And so, there are still hard days, and desperate wishes that I could go back in time and somehow make long-relinquished careers work somehow despite knowing deep down that yes, there is a disability that is invisible to me but is probably wildly apparent to everyone else.
And I despise that I have become so reliant on the system, and I desperately do sort of wish self-esteem-wise that they would somehow review me and magically find me not needing SSDI somehow, that yes, that there has been substantial improvement in my condition.
And, I know that I am lucky, too, even if I don’t feel that way.
But, at this point, I just desperately wish for normalcy, and the ability to support myself, and I am soooo tired of feeling like money is an issue. Because in our house, it is always an issue. And that’s a tough thing to admit with the level of meticulous budgeting I do daily. That could be a whole other post. But it is the truth.
In late April, I brought in someone to help me start cleaning up our house. To say the boys’ rooms were problematic was an understatement. It wasn’t their fault: We have five pets, and I hadn’t gotten in to help them declutter or clean much in probably three years.
Over the course of three visits, my helper and I tamed the mess entirely.
The first visit, we tackled Porter’s room. I’d already packed up a good bit of things that he’ll want to save, so a lot of our project was rearranging books and actual de-furring every item and surface. And, getting rid of a lot of trash, too.
But with her first visit, I gained momentum to keep going on my own. I cleaned up the mess in the dining room. I tackled boxes in our bedroom. I re-arranged our bedroom.
The second visit was Oliver’s room (which was not in as bad shape as the others because he has a cat that lives in his room so his room had to be cleaned at least a little), and also the bathrooms in the house.
The momentum continued after her visit; I kept up maintenance cleaning and managed to make the kitchen desk shelving (and desk and kitchen table themselves) presentable and useable.
The third visit was Liam’s room and all the floors in the house, and some dusting.
And, all of a sudden…..I have a sanctuary baseline to work with to maintain.
We have a four-bedroom, single-story house with all luxury vinyl plank and tile flooring throughout. And two and a half bathrooms, one of which has a tile and grout shower and a garden jetted tub.
It’s a big house. Big by my standards, anyway.
So, here’s my new summer schedule….. I worked it out and the actual work each day should not be more than an hour and a half on the heaviest work days. The schedule will change in the Fall both because the big boys will be off at their colleges and my schedule will change too:
The Weekly Schedule
Sunday: Church & Rest & Maybe Swimming
Morning: Zero chores. Head to church and Costco.
Afternoon (3:00 PM onwards): Make beds, pet care (which involves changing puppy pads and scooping cat litter), two loads of laundry, unload/load dishwasher, scan for fur balls & five-minute pickup, swipe toilets, wipe down all counters, boys to maybe swimming.
Monday: Sheets & Swim (Oliver goes swimming on Monday afternoons)
Daytime Block: Make beds, pet care, four loads of laundry (sheets), unload/load dishwasher, scan for fur balls & five-minute pickup, swipe toilets, wipe down all counters.
Weekly Task: Quick dusting of main areas.
Floor Task: Steam mop primary bath and bedroom.
Afternoon: Swimming with Oliver.
Tuesday: Volunteer & Bathrooms
Morning: Volunteer time
Daytime Block: Make beds, pet care, two loads of laundry, unload/load dishwasher, scan for fur balls & five-minute pickup, swipe toilets, wipe down all counters.
Weekly Task: Clean bathrooms.
Weekly Task: Mow one yard segment (our grass is not in one section— there are 5 distinct sections of grass).
Floor Task: Steam mop kitchen and laundry room and powder room.
Wednesday: Volunteer & Bare Minimum
Morning: Volunteer time
Daytime Block: Make beds, pet care, two loads of laundry, unload/load dishwasher, scan for fur balls & five-minute pickup, swipe toilets, wipe down counters.
Weekly Task: None. Rest and recover from the drive.
Thursday: Catch-All Floors
Daytime Block: Make beds, pet care, two loads of laundry, unload/load dishwasher, scan for fur balls & five-minute pickup, swipe toilets, wipe down counters.
Weekly Task: Swiffer/sweep all floors.
Floor Task: Steam mop living room, dining room, and hallway.
Friday: Projects & Swim
Daytime Block: Make beds, pet care, two loads of laundry, unload/load dishwasher, scan for fur balls & five-minute pickup, swipe toilets, wipe down counters.
Weekly Task: Project Day (this is where I will do things like clean out a closet or unpack a box in storage in the attic or under the house).
Floor Task: Steam mop boys’ bedrooms.
Afternoon: Jared takes youngest swimming.
Evening: Date night.
Saturday: Yard & Flex
Daytime Block: Make beds, pet care, two loads of laundry, unload/load dishwasher, scan for fur balls & five-minute pickup, swipe toilets, wipe down counters.
Weekly Task: Mow one yard segment.
And having the schedule worked out like that, I feel free to create the kind of daily rhythm I struggled to establish and maintain when the boys were younger. I’m not 100% sure that two loads of laundry per day will be necessary, even, but if I don’t keep it in the schedule I won’t stay on top of the laundry and then there will be a dozen loads to do in one day.
I’m finding that I loved raising my boys, and I love even more now that two are successfully out of high school and the third is solidly in middle school. Motherhood has not been easy or come naturally to me and I am realizing I have been mostly in survival mode for nearly twenty years.
Now that there is room to breathe and no toys underfoot, my psyche is relaxing quite a bit. And I love chatting and spending time with my big boys now that no one is little. I was not the baby-person in the household; most people know that person was solidly Jared.
I realize that house cleaning is not rocket science; I was learning to tend to my house as a young child. It’s not lack of knowledge or even lack of discipline; it’s that somewhere over the last twenty years of life and motherhood, I lost my bearings.
And I’m under no illusion: it will take work to maintain this momentum, and I deal with mental illness and there will be days I just cannot.
It’s strange though, to go from feeling hopeless about the state of our house in April to all of a sudden feeling like I could have guests over right now if I wanted to.
There would be more photos, but the beds are not made because it is sheets day.
I’ve long since struggled with waking in the morning, but with this schedule and a sense of hope and feeling of gratitude about my life, I managed to wake up at 5:00 this morning and have my quiet time before everyone else was up. That is the magic part of the day for me, and my days don’t feel complete when I oversleep out of depression or exhaustion.
