I'D LIKE TO tell you that we lived happily ever after and this was just the beginning of our wonderful life together. I'd like to tell you that just like Cinderella and Prince Charming, our troubles were behind us, but that would be a fairy tale, and I didn't start the story with “Once Upon a Time,” did I?
The truth is Cinderella and Prince Charming probably didn't live happily ever after either. I imagine like Justin and me, they had disagreements. Like us, they probably fell in and out of love a million times over stupid things like bills and babies, the reality that sneaks in and sucks the dreamy part of the story away. But also like us, they always came back to their commitment and promise. We promised forever to each other, and as God as my witness, we will forever be together.
I still battle the raging alcoholic within me, pushing it back with strength from a higher power I know as Jesus Christ—and with the reminders of that morning in the alley and all the nights of misery with my mom and Clayton.
We both still have nightmares that wake us up in the middle of the night and scars from our youth that will never be erased. Justin had so much guilt about the breaking and entering we did that when I got to the step where I was to make amends, he made his own amends. He tried to find everyone on the block but couldn't reach them all.
“What's past is past; it's all forgiven,” Gramma Diaz had said when we knocked on the door of the much older, much more wrinkled version of the grandmotherly cookie lady she once had been. She shuffled to the door and opened it to us like we never grew up.
She was happy to hear we were OK and she admitted she always worried over us but didn't know what to do—and that the Mister had caught on to our break-ins, which is why the cookies appeared in the mudroom. I pretended to need to use the bathroom only so I could see the picture wall once more. It was smaller than I remembered—only eight or ten feet, hardly the mile long hall of my childhood—but still they smiled. Now I knew why: there was happiness to be found in the world. There was healing. There was good.
It’s my job, and Justin's, and yours to rage against the darkness, to fight against the monsters of our past and to become who we are meant to be.
I was meant to be Justin's, and to feed my own neighborhood children cookies on Wednesdays, and to become an interior designer who brings color and structure and style into the lives of my clients.
I was meant to be a mom—a good mom who dances with her children, Zach and Vasi, sober, and meets their bus at the top of the road every afternoon and gives them a kiss and hug every night before bed.
Justin was meant for a greatness I cannot even express. He was made to love someone as unlovable as I had been and never give up on those he believes in. He was made to fight for those who are weak and teach punk kids how to play the guitar. And he was made to fly—only instead of teleporter machines or fighter jets, he’s been flying Med-evac helicopters since getting out of the Air Force. He’s spending his life saving lives every day, just like he saved mine so long ago.
We survive, accepting what we cannot change. We are courageous to make our life and the lives of our children better than ours was.
Nope, not a fairy tale, not a happily-ever-after, just one day at a time. Easy does it.
THE END