Forward to The Breakup Year

I met Tom in September 2005 at a bar called The Burren in Somerville, Massachusetts.  I was twenty-six years old, he was twenty-four.  Later, you'll read the story about how we met.  You'll read a lot about our story.  There aren't enough pages to tell you the entire thing -- what you will mostly read about is how our relationship ended in November 2014.  But you'll get a good snapshot. 

I didn't set out to write a book about my relationship with Tom.  I didn't set out to write a book at all.  The essays, poems, and pieces of fiction in this book are part of a yearly blog project I began six years ago in response to my first "Tom divorce."  Ours was a complicated relationship, as you'll learn, but when we'd had our first significant falling out in October 2010, I needed something to redirect me, so I gave myself a challenge -- a New Year's Resolution -- to write every day, which I did, starting January 1, 2011.  By the end of the year, some unexpected things happened.  First, Tom and I made up, and also, people were reading what I was writing.  They were asking, "What's next?"  So I did another blog in 2012, this one all fiction, and another in 2013, this one were friends gave me "three things" I used those to write something, another in 2014, a choose-your-own adventure novel, and then in 2015, my goal was to use music to inspire my writing every day.  My relationship with Tom ended about a month and a half before the start of that blog, which created something of the perfect storm.  As you read, you'll learn the importance of music to me and the importance of music to Tom, a very diverse and talented musician.  You'll learn about the importance of music and creativity in our relationship.  And you'll also learn what I learned the hard way every single day -- music can be emotionally gruelling.  The result:  my Singalong 2015 blog turned into a public journal of sorts, a place where I worked out a lot of the stuff churning through my brain.  By the end of the year, I'd written a book about Tom, and I still don't know exactly how I feel about that.

Recently, I was reading a blog post I'd written back in August 2014 about how social media was completely changing the definition of "norms" in social interactions and in it, I wrote about chronic over-sharers, stating:

"I know for a personal fact it's possible to be going through hell and keep it offline.  Airing your sad or dirty laundry to the masses probably isn't going to heal you the way you want.  At least I know it wouldn't heal me.  

I was chatting with my friend Elliott the other day about how I was writing this post and how when I was fairly young, my mother had warned me, pretty sternly, to be very very careful about what I chose to put in writing because you cannot take that back.  What you put in writing is forever.  You can say things in the heat of any moment and while those things can certainly have a lasting effect, the memory of how that shit went down will change over time until it completely fades or has distorted enough that its reliability isn't so grand anymore.  But the things you write down can be read over and over and over again.  And things you write on the internet?  There's no eraser big enough to destroy that evidence.  Think about that before you post.  This is your legacy."

When I stumbled across this passage I'd written, I stopped and thought about how I still agreed with these ideas while also recognizing I had gone against that grain and gotten very personal in the 2015 blog.  My intention wasn't to "air dirty laundry" -- it was to make sense of the information, both rational and not, swirling in my brain.  It was helpful and healing and progressive and forward-moving.  And not just for me -- first one friend then another then another came to me, messaged me, commented right there on Facebook about how what I was writing was helping them get through difficult breakups, divorces, and other similar situations.  As the blog went along, I felt easier and freer about being completely honest -- naming names and bringing specificity into the picture.  You'll notice I don't start that way on January 1st.  It takes several months before I stop dancing around the issue and dive right in.  That's the authenticity of respect I have for those who are involved in this story, even Tom.  Especially Tom.  When 2015 began, I was truly hurting.  I was making big life decisions.  I was digging deep and looking for understanding and growth and the power to keep evolving.  In all sad honesty, I had no reason to believe he was doing similar work at all -- in fact, everything I heard from our many mutual friends and acquaintances was that he was continuing on the same destructive path -- and that also broke my heart.  

I say all this now as a way to prepare you for what you're about to read -- how it was written and why.  It will feel disjointed at times and it will change tone quickly.  It will repeat some information and also likely leave out things you wish you knew.  It's the modern day equivalent of reading my journal as I processed the end of the most important relationship of my life to date.  But the reason I wanted to pull the relevant blog entries and put them into book form is because they were helpful to me and helpful to others so maybe they could be helpful to you.  The universality of breakups is at the core here and even though the details of your story will be different than mine, my hope is that what I was thinking on January 1st versus what I was thinking on December 31st will show the possibility of growth and healing and change.  

I got through this "Breakup Year" with the help of countless friends and loved ones, a daily yoga practice, a daily writing practice, and listening to the podcast You Made It Weird with Pete Holmes.  

So let's get into it.

Boo

Throughout the course of my life, I have fortunately had many great, sage role models, folks wise beyond reason, who’ve served as teachers, mentors, friends, and family. When I think back over all of the people who’ve taught me the most, though, there is one that stands out. Her name was Boo and she was a dark tabby cat who lived with my family for nineteen years.

Boo was right out of kittenhood when she came to stay with us. I was probably around five-years-old and I was so excited for her arrival. Our first family pet, Muffin, also a dark tabby cat, had passed away suddenly after running head first into our grandfather clock — you can’t make this stuff up. And while we missed Muffin, my mother, a music teacher, had a former student who needed someone to take care of her cat while she went to work on a cruise line for two weeks. I’m sure my mom thought, sure, easy gig, it’ll make the kids happy to have a pet for a bit.

And so Boo came to stay.

Boo was the name she came with, also — her real name was actually “Booshwa,” slang for bourgeois, though my mom’s student said she thought Booshwa “might be a bad word,” and so she changed it for our delicate sensibilities, youngins that my brothers and I were. Boo turned out to be far more appropriate since what this cat actually did was scare the shit out of us on a daily basis. Even my father, a six-foot-three man, was afraid of her. She still had her claws and she had an awfully terrifying growl that was frequently followed by a spitting hiss. She liked to hide at the bottom of the stairs and come flying out from nowhere to attack anyone who dared come down. She especially hated men since, we later learned, my mother’s student lived with her boyfriend who used to shut Boo in the closet when he was left alone with her.

This cat was a nightmare pet for a home with three small children — my older brother Casey being probably 7 and my younger brother Joshua being 3. But my father, especially, was bound and determined to win this beast over. So he spent time hanging out near her, inching ever closer to the point where she allowed him to pet her, and before you knew it, my dad and Boo were the best of friends.

I’m not entirely sure how long this process took since the original plan for us to have Boo for two weeks stretched into a third week and then a fourth and then a few more months as her owner kept returning to the cruise line for more gigs until finally there was no more discussion about when this ornery cat might leave our home. I’m not sure her original owner officially gave her up, but she certainly became ours — and that cat was in charge.

She chilled out on the sneak attacks but would still, on occasion, express her displeasure at our youthful exuberance. She liked to sit on top of the refrigerator and swipe her paw at unsuspecting passers-by. She found a crawl space in the basement that allowed her to peer down on anyone doing laundry so you’d get that creepy sensation that someone was watching and get a real jolt if you turned around and caught a glimpse of those shiny cat eyes reflecting at you. And, man oh man, don’t leave chicken on your plate or she will eat it. She’d jump right onto the table and snatch whatever she wanted and which one of us was going to tell her she couldn’t? Boo was a tough old broad who didn’t take any shit.

And, oh my, did we love her.

She learned to love us all, too, but none more so than my father. Just like Muffin, the cat who came before her, she liked to sleep in his briefcase and whenever he was home, she was never too far out of reach. She followed him everywhere and they became the best of friends, which was also a miracle as far as my father was concerned since he’d grown up on a farm where cats were outdoor animals who lived in the barn. He’d agreed to have a cat in the house because his tiny blonde daughter (hey, that’s me!) wanted one so, but he had not been jazzed about Muffin or Boo coming to live with us. But seeing the loving bond he formed with this cat who’d gotten her start by terrorizing us was a beautiful thing.

After we’d had Boo in our home for awhile, the decision was made that it was time for us to get a kitten. We’d never had a kitten before, since both Muffin and Boo were adult cats by the time we got them, so my now six-year-old brain was totally wow’d. She was a dark tortoiseshell kitten who purred from the word go and was my constant companion. I named her Bubbles and she was one of the early loves of my life.

While it was an easy fit for Bubbles and me, we all worried how Boo might respond to this…intruder. But an interesting thing happened: Boo adopted Bubbles as if she were her own kitten, grooming her and cuddling with her and showing her the ropes. Maybe it was a sign that Boo was learning to love and trust, something none of us were sure she’d be able to do when she first came to live with us.

When my father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in March 1986, everything changed as he spent more and more time in the hospital. My mother’s parents came to stay with us so she could spend time with her husband as they battled this aggressive disease that my brothers and I were too young to understand. Boo become even more devoted to Bubbles during this time, so it only became that much more heartbreaking when we discovered that Bubbles, my beloved kitten, had a tumor growing in her throat and we had to make the difficult decision to put her to sleep.

And a week after we buried her in the backyard next to Muffin, my father died, too.

After those heartbreaking back to back losses, all of our lives changed, even Boo’s. The two friends she cherished most on the planet were gone in the blink of an eye and I don’t think she ever got over it. We had many other cats come to live with us over the course of her life (and you better believe she outlived them all), but she never bonded with any of them like she did with Bubbles. She did love my mother and my brothers and me — especially my older brother Casey — but it wasn’t the same as her devotion to my father. It was like she knew to give just enough not to get hurt — that she’d learned her lesson the hard way. But she was a survivor, so she continued on, stronger than ever, a real matriarch in our household.

And as my childhood rolled on, Boo became more and more in charge of, well, everything. When we had parties, she’d sit in the middle of the kitchen table and survey those coming and going. Better not try and pet her — she will stare you down. And don’t leave cake out, because she’ll definitely eat it. Even if she has to knock it off the table or chew through the box. One time, she even managed to open a cupboard, climb onto a shelf and gnaw through a box of Twinkies because her sweet tooth was not to be stopped. We had to hide stuff like that in high shelves or in the oven or the microwave and I can only imagine how the wheels in her brain would spin as she tried to figure out a way around these cruel obstacles to her frosting addiction. Outside of that undeniable sweet tooth, she was tough as nails, strict as hell, but totally in love with our family. She took care of us more than we took care of her and I still feel her influence on my life to this day.

When she was maybe thirteen, we discovered a large mass growing on her back, so we took her to our vet. He told us that lumps on a dog were usually nothing — but lumps on a cat were often trouble — and he gave us the sad news that Boo had a malignant tumor that he could remove but her prognosis was still pretty dire. My mother agreed to have the surgery done, anyway, and a miraculous thing happened: when we brought Boo home, what she did was spend all day laying in sunny spots, listening to classical music. She loved classical music. So if we put a radio with classical music in a sunny spot, she’d lay with her head next to the speaker, purring audibly as she worked to heal herself post-surgery. It was truly unreal. And the vet was shocked at her next check up to see that Boo was doing even better than she had been doing before the tumor was discovered.

That tumor returned two more times over the next few years, each time with my mother opting for the surgery, each time with Boo recovering in record time. Sunshine and classical music were her cure-alls. Those images of her basking in the warmth will never be erased from my brain.

As she got older, Boo developed another odd habit — she’d sometimes wander through the dark house at night making the most mournful, yelping, unnatural sounds. I always wondered if she was being visited by my father or by Bubbles or by other forces from the Great Beyond. There was something so pungent about hearing her cry like that and if I could, I’d go to her and cuddle with her until she calmed down. It was a sadness that sticks with me just as much as her ability to go to the sun to heal.

I realized when I sat down to write about her today that I don’t have a single photo of her. But I can see her, clear as day, in my mind’s eye and it warms my heart to think of this complex beast of a cat. She taught me so much about life and survival and love and fear and growth and adaptation. She was a true friend, a guardian, a protective force. I’ve known many cats in my life but there will never be one like Boo. She came into our lives for a very concrete reason: to be an example of how to overcome. I loved her very much and was always sad I didn’t get to say a final goodbye to her before my mother made the necessary choice to put her to sleep, ailing as she was in her ancient years. But like all great loves, I carry her with me in my heart, in my mind, in my soul, and always will, still learning from her example, still relishing in telling the story of her life.

Boo was one of the greats. She was an epic tale trapped in a body with a twitching, gray and black stripped tail. I am thankful for the many years she was part of our family and still think of her as a role model. I certainly go to the sunny spot whenever I need to heal and never turn down a piece of cake. All in loving memory of the cat that would have been Booshwa if the fates had allowed it.

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From the Inspired in 2017 blog project.

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