Southeast Texas has greeted me with heavy rains and heavier traffic. I’m having an asthma attack from weeds and mold gone wild. It is a weight on my chest, like a heavy stone.
Following a late evening arrival and the exhaustion of three sleepless nights, I awoke to my clean clothes still outside in my truck, my meds out of reach, my dog not hogging the bed, and a familiar ache in my hips from sleeping on a too-hard mattress.
I miss Blanche. I miss her womb-like comfort. I miss my perfectly-cushioned bed. I miss the space that belonged to me. I miss being able to reach inches or walk a mere two-to-four feet to get whatever I needed in the middle of the night. I miss knowing if the power went out, I’d be warm in winter (I have to work on that “cool in summer” thing when I get settled somewhere).
I know it’s only temporary. I know I’ll leave the coast and find my way back “home” to Blanche and to a place to put her that brings me comfort and peace for a longer period of time. But for the next three-plus weeks, I am in a stranger’s house, in a neighborhood I’ve never known, making do with facilities with which I am uncomfortable.
Hitting the Road
When I left Blanche Wednesday morning, I felt sick. It distressed me more to leave my little camper behind than it did for me to leave Surfside Beach a year ago; far more than it did to leave the house I shared with my second husband in 2020. It didn’t help that twenty-four hours prior, my doctor had called and forced me to cancel my appointment; one of the main reasons I was traveling. Now I was looking at extra time and expense in Houston for no good reason.
As I drove, I spoke to my brother about leaving Blanche and I began to cry. We discussed the why of the situation.
Why is my attachment to a seventeen-foot-long trailer so powerful?
I have never felt safer in a home than I feel in that little fiberglass bubble on two wheels.
Delving deeply into this risks too-intimate a discussion in this space, but I realized that my safety and comfort for forty years were constantly in jeopardy in a way I sensed but could not previously express.
I became suicidal just five years into my second marriage without any real understanding of why. Oddly, I was never suicidal when married to my physically abusive first husband. I was afraid for my life at his hands, but not concerned I would take my own life.
Being on the road with Blanche, while full of emotional breakthroughs and turmoil, scary from a financial point of view, and frustrating when it comes to people in my life not understanding what I have been through, has been the first time since 1983 (first marriage and on) that I felt truly safe.
Understand, I had very intense and fearful moments on the road. Those moments were not a result of Blanche but of transient circumstances. They were not the result of someone in my life directing me, one way or another, into a sense of personal insecurity. I’ve written of them here: my fear of mountains, my fear of isolation from family, and my concerns over being able to find the right path to financial and emotional security.
None of those moments were the result of someone holding disapproval and abandonment over my head. There are people in my life who disapprove of me and threaten (directly or otherwise) to abandon me at times; they do not dictate my living arrangements, therefore they do not make me feel any less safe and secure within Blanche.
The most important man in my life for thirty years held an emotional ax over my head and I, never knowing when that ax would fall, lived in constant anxiety within every home I inhabited with him. I so often had nightmares of him abandoning me, that it became, literally, a joke between us.
The shock, and the reason I cried, as the miles between myself and my little camper fell away, is that while I had recently made this discovery intellectually, I had not truly confronted it emotionally. I had so effectively hidden this from myself as a matter of self-preservation that when my brother uttered the words, “Blanche is probably the first time you’ve felt truly safe in years, decades even,” my heart absolutely couldn’t endure full comprehension of this.
Stones Large and Small
Now and then I have a memory; something small and innocuous that shouldn’t mean anything. Once I understand the motives behind the behavior in that memory, it means so much more. When I do, I am sometimes momentarily overwhelmed with sadness or rage. If I described some of these instances out of context to someone, they might wonder why I am seething or sobbing. These seemingly innocuous memories should be manageable.
They are pebbles in an avalanche.
The realization of how safe and free I felt while living in Blanche—is a boulder.
Sometimes the weight of all these stones is just too much.
