The margaritas at Fonda have always been a little too strong – and a little too tart and tasty to stop at just one. That's where Mr. Trinkle and I were for dinner last Saturday night, eating grilled calamari, quesadillas, and guacamole, washing it all down with margaritas on the rocks, no salt. My in-laws had gone home earlier in the day and my mother was babysitting the kid, who was in bed for the night. Getting out was our opportunity to reconnect after almost a week of Christmas and visitor preparation, after almost six months of dissertation completion. The plan was to talk without interruption, to have tequila-smoothed conversation, to just be for few hours. Free babysitting, flavorful food, and a margarita or two: Conditions were perfect.

So it might surprise you that one quarter through that first margarita we started fighting. We don't fight often these days, and when we do it's usually quite civil. This was an old-style fight with incredulous looks and just-caught nastiness. Each of us thought the other was clueless, wasn't listening, was going off on some crazy tangent. Ultimately, we pulled it back together, reached a deeper understanding, but for fifteen tense minutes, I fought the urge to run out of the restaurant into the cold rain. I fought the urge to be by myself and pretend that it was better this way, to live without risk, to be warmed only by my own intellect and senses.

Yes, here they are again. My parents after their wedding, June 1969, staring off into the misty future. It's too late now ...

Earlier that day, my mother and I had been talking about trust and infidelity. I explained how how I learned some time ago that to trust in others blindly is foolish because no one is perfect. Other people can let you down, not out of cruelty, but because they are human and bound to make mistakes. If you expect perfection or total fidelity, you may end up very disappointed, so why not keep an open mind about it? Not to expect to be let down, but to not let yourself get crushed if it happens?

The words had come out with more vitriol and less clarity than I felt. I sounded angry, specifically with my husband, and Mom asked me if he knew I was so angry. Strange. I didn't feel angry. But there Mr. Trinkle and I were in Fonda a few hours later, raising our voices. For the last half of the fight, I'd been dabbing at my eyes with the corner of my cloth napkin, trying to hold back the tears. It felt like I'd been willing them not to fall for weeks, maybe months, while I kept the rest of life together. When it was over, when we reached détente, the tears came out, along with the sudden understanding that this whole thing was all about my mother. Or maybe it wasn't that simple. It was also all about my father. And let's not forget to point a finger at the dissertation and the feelings it stirred up in its death throes. That thing was once used as a wedge, a separator, an agent of my perceived rejection. The diss is dead and buried now. It hadn't been an issue for years. What could I hold against a corpse?

Here is my mother, more present than I ever remember. There is no demanding, angry Kevin, no Baltimore petty criminal heroin addict boyfriend, no personal life drama to get in the way. When Mr. Trinkle and I left the East Coast, the addict was the center of her life. Interacting with her then felt like a continual rejection, an extension of the loneliness of childhood, though I see now that that the rejection has never been personal. In the past two and a half years, she's changed her life. The addict is now on the periphery, no longer the center of her world. There is no drama. She is here, flawed but available. I have just enough safe space for the anger to emerge. It's wordless, this anger, and scared, too, rage coupled with fear. I know she is capable of turning on me, of causing great pain, of making me wish I never existed. Or at least that's how it used to be.

Here is my husband, present and loving. The days of avoidance by dissertation are long over, but I remember them, remember how neatly our neuroses fit together, his reluctance dovetailing with my grasping need for absolute acceptance, with the tests and the tantrums, the nastiness and tossed objects. We have a history, a time when I felt very rejected, unloveable, and even though we've talked the hell out of it, there are still those tight corners in our relationship that remind me.

Combine my mother's visit with the completion of the dissertation and those deep feelings of unworthiness rise up. They poke and prod. I want to run out in the rain and be alone forever. I want to ball up my fists and shadowbox in the cold attic. I want to be invisible, the observer who cannot be observed. An old self-protective voice whispers if you let them get too close, they could destroy you. Keep your distance. But this is not the only way to see things. I have choices.

Now the struggle to be present, to be in the moment, is mine. If I don't give all of myself over, if I hold back, I don't risk absolute rejection. It used to be that I would test the ones who loved me, would stamp my feet and pepper every fight with threats to leave. These days I hide under a carapace of calm. I hold it together and when I do break, I tend to downplay my vulnerability. I maintain a friendly facade, a protective attitude. Intimacy equals risk. Oh, it's easy with you, reader. We have geographical distance and thick words to separate us. The pull of the everyday, the undertow of the mundane, doesn't come between us. We can pretend for a few minutes that we are intimates, reach an understanding without touch, and then return to our real lives unscathed.

Already all of this is changing for me. By the time my thoughts get to you, I'm working them out, naming the feelings, articulating them so I can put them away. One of the reasons this blog was so important to my recovery process (I call it a recovery process because I don’t know what else to call it) is because it gave me a place to name my fears, to articulate my ugliness in a relatively risk-free environment. Still, there are risks. When I find out that someone I know in real life or from my past has read the blog, I feel a panicked thrill – they know! (Depending on how far they've read, of course. They may know very little.) And then my stomach sinks and I feel a different sort of panic. I'm afraid of being judged for the things I've done, for those I've scraped up along the way. But I also worry that they will read and think: She deserved it. They will wonder about the intrinsic evil in me, about the horrible things I must have done to cause my family to abandon me. Rationally, I know this is crazy. Emotionally, it makes my heart ache.

I feel it. I name it. I let it go. But it isn't easy.

Tags: guilt, child neglect, existential angst, family, secrets, shame