• Calming the Ghosts

    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. 

  • I’m Trying

    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. 

  • Taming the Mess and the Schedule

    The inside of our home is now my sanctuary.

    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.

    A win.

  • I Forgot to Answer

    Photo credit: Virginia Hall

    I don’t even remember how I got to that guy’s hotel room. He was staying at the Marriott downtown, which was uncharacteristic of him at the time. 

    I do remember stopping for gas in Stockbridge on the way to pick him up. I was wearing a purple dress with thin straps that had sequins on them. It was relatively low cut; I couldn’t wear a bra with the dress because of the straps and low cut issues. I do remember the smile from a random guy when I stopped to get gas at that gas station. 

    I chose to wear the exact same dress to my first date with Jared precisely a week later. It remains in my closet to this day. Occasionally despite weighing a tad more, I still pull it out to wear it even these days when I am feeling like it. 

    You know what else? I remember not one little thing about seeing that show, Les Mis, with the other guy. Except I remember being utterly impressed by the cast; so much so that I knew I wanted to see the show with Jared before it left Atlanta. 

    Which is how I bought tickets to Les Mis for the next weekend, called Jared and offered him the other ticket, and that is why Jared asked off for the Friday of his very first week of employment with Grinnell College— because I’d offered him tickets to the show the weekend before he started work, and he’d said yes. He told Grinnell he had a prior commitment. He probably didn’t tell them the prior commitment was made the night before he started work at his new job that Monday. 

    It’s pretty strange though that I remember not a thing about that evening with the other guy, the week prior to the show with Jared. I don’t remember dinner— surely we went to dinner, probably at the Spaghetti Factory— because it was my normal regular favorite haunt at the time.

    I don’t remember dinner, I have vague recollections of sitting beside the guy at the Fox (with the emphasis being on the stellar cast, not the company) I have not one memory of saying goodbye to him that evening. I remember I must have been driving but I have zero recollection of saying goodbye. 

    And I do very vividly remember the other guy pretty much verbatim asking “Can we talk about marriage?” 

    And I really wish I could go back and look at my face, and see my reaction. It was not a proposal. It was a non-proposal, in fact. 

    And that is pretty flabbergasting, actually, that I remember so very little. It’s not every day that someone asks you to talk about marriage, which is exactly what happened in that hotel room; that is all that happened for once in that hotel room. 

    I thought about the other guy’s peculiar, intentionally degrading personal preferences in that moment. I thought about the glances he gave other women, glances he didn’t even try to hide, when we were out together. I thought about not being included in his graduation festivities.

    The other guy was too late in September of 2003. 

    I did say no to that already moderately middle-aged professional deep into his new career path. He lied too much. There had been too many lies in the five years’ previous and I’m pretty sure I said something precisely to that effect. I gave not one thought at all to his career trajectory, or a comfortable lifestyle that might follow. I gave not a single thought at all to the fact that the irony was lost; if he’d asked three months prior— if he’d bothered to show up to my GSU graduation– I would have had a different life altogether. 

    As it was, then I told him I was talking to a guy online, and I wanted to see where it went, that I was pretty sure it could get serious quickly. I probably told him his name was Jared and that he lived in Iowa. 

    Which, actually, is pretty darn astounding. Replaying what little of the scene I do remember in my head is head-spinning because saying no to that guy in any capacity was uncharacteristic for me.

    This would have been September 13, 2003. I know this because I saw the exact same Les Mis show (sadly with a replacement Valjean) the very next week, September 20, with Jared. 

    I’d started talking to Jared in early July, 2003.

    Two months. Maybe a month and a half— MAYBE— of chatting on the phone. Probably not much more than a month of actual video chatting.

    It took that little time, and I knew for certain that I was done with the other guy, to the exclusion of marriage entirely.

    Even 23 years later, the sequence astounds me. I’d seen the guy for five years. I’d pined away for him for most of that time, lamenting my tangentially insignificant place in his life. 

    And probably it makes perfect sense to people who have known Jared for decades, and it makes sense to me now because I know my huband intimately now. But to 23-year old me, with the power differential involved, with the unique history…..

    The fact that I told that man no with hardly a thought— with hardly a pause— I told him no to marriage talk for the very, very remote possibility that something might happen with someone who lived 900 miles away–

    That speaks to the level of respect, to the level of care Jared presented from the start for our relationship.

    And Jared did know about who I was going to that show with. I have never asked him, but maybe he sat around all that particular Saturday evening, one of his first nights in Grinnell, channeling his inner karmic medium to be able to influence my emotions. Those who know Jared well know about his ability to influence people in that way when he so has a mind to do so. Maybe my strength came from knowing that he was going to be around, that it was going to somehow work out. I’d gotten that vibe from the very first conversation online the previous July. 

    Because I don’t really know what got into me either that weekend, to ask him to that show, to buy the tickets before he even had a plane ticket. We’d never met in person. I knew enough to know he wasn’t likely a scary person. But the whole situation was kind of out of character.

    It was out of my safe zone. I don’t know that my friends would have said I was exactly predictable before, but inviting some random guy I met on the internet….IN 2003…..that was NOT in my newly-graduated plans. 


    It doesn’t bother me that I don’t remember much about a proposal that wasn’t a proposal. It’s odd, but the important weekend was the weekend after.

    And somehow, the fact that the scene didn’t end in the early 2000s, that there was renewed contact which brought me to know current events and his levels of world-class success, brings to mind the scene in “A Christmas Carol” in which Belle’s husband tells her he has gone past Scrooge’s office and he was bent over his desk counting his ledger on Christmas Eve, and Belle remarks how she feels pity for him, as her children with her husband run around them both. 

    That is exactly the precise emotional feeling I am left with after I have processed a lot of anger and angst and drama…..I feel sorry for him and his circumstances, even with and perhaps precisely in part because of his massively successful professional life.

    And I sort of gawk as I sit here in June of 2026, with Jared sitting directly across from me as I type this sitting at Gallery Row in Carrollton, Georgia, my hometown. Because the circumstances that surround our meeting could be straight out of a book, and it is normal to me. 

    Because it really happened….Jared and I really started chatting online, with a simple “smile” exchanged on Lavalife, on June 30, and July 1, 2003. What is so simple as an every day “swipe left” in modern times was a delicious little stigmatized secret in the summer of 2003. And yet here we are, and we have built a life together that still somehow makes me know that everything will be okay no matter what. 

    But I don’t think most people who interact with Jared and me on a daily basis in any capacity really much stop to think that yes, in 2003….Jared lived in Nebraska, moved to Iowa late that summer, with no plans to move to Georgia….Jared had never even been to Georgia until September of 2003….except that he saw a very dim photo of me online and I made him laugh at my writing because I talked about liking cheese and cats on a dating profile. 

    And Jared successfully guessed that my screen name “Cosettecie” was based off my love of Les Mis (I wasn’t terribly original as I paired my initials with it)…..and he wrote to me like an actual human being with actual feelings. Even in the landscape of 2003 online dating, that approach was a pretty darn refreshing way of speaking online to a woman you thought you might date. 

    And there was very much a proposal a little over a year later, in October of 2004, with Jared right on his knee with a ring and a rose, right by my desk in the basement at Fernbank, shocking me that he was even in the state the night of Timeless. An actual romantic proposal in which I said yes…..after I had to be reminded to do so because I was in shock, not out of hesitation, after I took the ring box and showed my boss.

    Is that something anybody else has done? Take the ring, without giving an answer, to show off to someone else? Because yes, that is indeed something I did. And Jared, laughing every time, never lets me forget it.