My favorite game when I was a little kid was something I called "The Spinning Game."

I would spin around as fast as I could, for as long as I could stand it, before finally dropping to the ground and collapsing into a dizzy exhausted heap. What thrilled me about the game was the way it altered my perception: I loved the way the world kept spinning for those long, ecstatic moments after I’d stopped twirling around the yard.

"Don’t you love this? Isn’t this GREAT?" I’d shout at my little brother, as he lay barfing into the grass beside me.

We would spin together until Grandma made us stop, or until we were both too queasy to continue. For those brief few seconds after I’d hurled myself to the ground, I felt intensely, deliciously alive. The problem was that it never lasted long enough. Eventually the world would slowly quit rolling and looping  ...  the sky and earth would reconnect ... the ride would be over.  Moments later I would jump back to my feet for another frenetic turn around the yard, and for another thirty or forty seconds of temporary euphoria.

     *     *     *     *     *     *

The hospital where I was born in December 1957 no longer exists. When I was a little girl, I asked Daddy to take me to see my birthplace. 

"It's a mall now, Sweetie," he said.  

I felt like I'd been slapped. A MALL?  Would you build a SHOPPING MALL over Lincoln's birthplace?  An Orange Julius stand on the spot where Mozart was born? 

This was sacrilege, pure and simple. 

I've hated shopping malls ever since.

My mother dropped out of high school, pregnant at age sixteen, in order to marry my dad, an unemployed 22-year-old auto mechanic.  Theirs was a stormy marriage that ended shortly after my little brother was born in 1959.

I narrowly escaped being named Diana Lynn  -- the name my parents chose for me before I was born.  My nearsighted Mama didn't get a good look at me until we were both being wheeled out of the delivery room.  At that point she decided I didn't look like a "Diana"  ...  I looked more like a "Terri."  I've always been grateful for this last-minute reprieve: "Diana" is a little too precious for my tastes.

I was a plump and sassy baby, round as a basketball, with huge blue eyes and a lot of straight dark hair.  My parents nicknamed me "Tae Lin" because they said I looked like a fat Chinese baby.

When our parents' marriage collapsed in the early 60's, Dickie and I were sent to live with our paternal grandparents. We lived with Grandma and Grandpa for eleven years, from 1962 to 1972. It was a warm and materially-comfortable upbringing.  It was also often strict and uncompromising. Grandma kept me in braids and saddle shoes during an era of bellbottoms and peace medallions. I was a Girl Scout, an honor student, first chair violinist in the school orchestra, president of our church youth group ...

... the quintessential "good girl" ...

... but what no one knew is that secretly I longed to be a hippie.

(Of course, by the time I was old enough to BE a hippie, the 60's were over and I was stuck with the goddamned Disco 70's. But that's another story for another day.)

I was one of those little girls who loved fairy tales: everything from The Brothers Grimm to Hans Christian Andersen. I was especially drawn to tales of true love denied but ultimately rewarded. I completely bought into the idea that for every princess there is a prince out there somewhere ... and if you had to kiss a few frogs along the way to find him, well, then the warts were worth it.

I fully expected to find my Prince someday.

The search began in first grade, when Larry Conway and I got married during lunch recess. The bride carried a bouquet of dandelions; the groom wore patches on the knees of his Toughskins. After the ceremony, the happy couple honeymooned on the monkey bars. The marriage didn't last for long: it ended when Larry chose Diana Higman to be his wife during The Farmer in the Dell. But the search for my Prince had begun. It became the all-consuming reason for my existence for the next thirtysomething years.

     *     *     *     *     *     *

I was never very athletic. I hated P.E. in school -- insert sad obligatory 'Always chosen last for softball' anecdote here --  sports left me cold.  When the other kids were outside riding bikes and tossing footballs, I preferred to curl up indoors with a good book. A precocious and insatiable reader, my early favorites included Mary Poppins, the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, any of the magic books by Edward Eager. When I got a little older I developed a passion for books about time travel and fantasy; Ruth M. Arthur and Madeleine L'Engle were two authors I especially liked.

I had an active and quirky imagination.  I believed in everything, from fairies to Oz ... from vampires to Jesus ... from angels to Lost In Space. The solitary hours I spent with my books and my imagination were a source of joy for me: as a result, I've never been afraid of spending time alone.

I liked to draw and to compose music on the piano. (Later I taught myself to play Grandpa's guitar, and soon I was composing songs on that, too  ...  mostly sad, draggy compositions about Jesus Christ dying on the cross for your sins.)  But writing was my true passion. On vacations, when the rest of my family was out hiking or rockhounding, I would find a shady spot under a tree and sit hunched over my pad of paper, writing gothic horror stories.

     *     *     *     *     *     *

As a child, each of my grandmothers gave me a gift that changed my life.

When I was seven or eight, Grandma St. John gave me an old manual typewriter, an ancient Remington that weighed almost as much as I did. I taught myself to type, haltingly at first but gradually gaining speed as I became familiar with the keyboard. Before long I was churning out stories, poems, plays, neighborhood newspapers, letters. Seeing my words printed on paper gave me an emotional charge like nothing I'd ever experienced.  

Then shortly before second grade ended, Grandma Vert gave me a little blue diary ... the kind with a tiny lock and key.  I was instantly charmed: here was a way of chronicling the minutiae my fabulously important life!  I became a lifelong diarist (and later, journaler) as a direct result of that little blue diary.

      *     *     *     *     *     *

At age twelve I became a born-again Christian during a four-day church retreat to the ocean. For the next few years, Boulevard Park Presbyterian Chuch was my home-away-from-home and the absolute center of my  world.  My first 'real' boyfriend was part of the church social clique, and our sweet chaste romance lasted for several months.

In 1972 Grandma Vert suffered a major heart attack. She survived, but it left her frail and bedridden for a while. As a result of her illness, my brother and I were sent to live with our father. A confirmed bachelor, Dad knew absolutely nothing about raising teenagers. My brother and I took full advantage of that fact.

I decided to cast off the shackles of my "repressed childhood" and purposely morphed myself into a Bad Girl. Virginity lost under a neighbor's tree by age fifteen ... drinking and drugging recreationally by sixteen ... on the verge of flunking out of high school by seventeen. 

I started drinking in tenth grade.  I knew from the moment I took my first drink that I was an alcoholic, but I didn't care. I took nothing seriously except romance, bouncing from one doomed, goofball relationship to another. My choices were almost always disastrous. I gravitated towards the dangerous, aloof, unattainable types ... the kind of guy who "loved" you in private but ignored you in public.

I had no plans for the future. I didn't care about that, either.

I graduated high school by my thumbs and went off to junior college for two years, "majoring" in journalism. Most of my college career was spent sitting in the Student Lounge with my friends, smoking Salem Slim Lights and reading pretentious poetry to each other. It didn't take me long to decide that journalism was too "structured" for me. What I really wanted to do was write from my heart and my experiences. So I switched from journalism classes to fiction and poetry, and enjoyed the first genuine scholastic success (read this: an "A" on my report card) I'd had since childhood. I was published locally on a few occasions, and felt certain that I was destined for greatness.

But, as was often the case, life interfered with my literary aspirations.

I quit j.c. one quarter short of completion. My dad and I weren't getting along, and by that point I'd suddenly decided that I wanted more than anything was "freedom" ...  which, to me, meant a job and an apartment of my own. I was 20 years old when I got my first real job, as  a receptionist for Lusk Metals, a local aluminum company. I got my Drivers License, bought a car, thought I was completely cool.  I had a nice, decent boyfriend -- we'd been "going steady" since our senior year in high school -- but I, in all of my infinite wisdom, decided to throw him over for the Main Aluminum Sales Guy at work. Older.  Balding.  Divorced with two kids. When the boss found out that the two of us were dating, I was fired on the spot. The Balding Aluminum Sales Guy was given a promotion.

But that was OK.  As soon as I was fired, I moved into his swinging bachelor pad with him.

The Balding Aluminum Sales Guy and I lived together for two years, maintaining a heady, materialistic, sex/drugs/rock&roll existence.  Lots of cocaine. Lots of four-star restaurants. Lots of expensive toys, trendy clothes, exotic vacations, conspicuous consumption. The term "Yuppie" hadn't been coined yet, but that's what we were: a couple of Yuppies-in-Training. The only real problem with our relationship, as far as I could see, was that he didn't want to have any more children. I, on the other hand, wanted to be a mother more than anything in the world.  I hoped that if we stayed together long enough -- if I got him to love me enough -- he would capitulate on the issue eventually. 

In early 1980, he was offered a huge job promotion that would require him to move to Portland, Oregon. We went on several house-hunting trips in the Portland area, finally putting money down together on a three bedroom condo.  On New Years Eve 1980, he toasted me with champagne and said, "This is gonna be our decade, babe."

I quit a job I adored, notified my astonished family and friends that I was moving out of state, ordered nifty new address labels, packed all of our belongings in anticipation of the move to Oregon.  I was twenty-two years old.

Two days before we were due to leave, I came home for lunch and there was a phone call from the BASG:

Babe.
I'm sorry.  I can't take you with me.
Please forgive me.

Crying/begging/pleading/threatening didn't work: his heart had turned to stone, overnight.  (Later I learned that he had reconciled with his ex-wife and taken her and the kids to Portland with him.)  A few nights later, in a fog of alcohol and despair, I picked up a Lusk Metals razor knife and ineptly opened my left wrist.

I survived.  It left an ugly scar  ... but I survived.

     *     *     *     *     *     *

Eighteen months later I was standing at the altar, marrying someone I knew I didn't love.

Six months after the Portland fiasco, I had been introduced to my future husband at a local bar. The same night that Future Husband and I met, we were in a horrific car accident together.  He pulled me out of the ruins of my 1972 Dodge Dart Swinger, literally saving my life. 

One year exactly to the day of the car accident, we were married.

To this day I can't tell you exactly why I married him, except that I felt tired and bruised by life, and I wanted to put down some roots. Also because he lived in a nice house and drove a cool black van and looked a little like Doug Henning, the magician guy.  Also because he didn't run screaming when I mentioned that I wanted to have babies, more or less right away.

But mainly because - at that point in my life - he was the only person who'd asked ... and I was terrified that this might be my only offer.

     *     *     *     *     *     *

We had three children in fairly short order.

Daughter #1 was born in December 1981, one week before my twenty-fourth birthday. She was followed fifteen months later by Daughter #2. Another three years later, Son #Only joined the family.

Motherhood was wonderful: everything I had ever dreamed or hoped or imagined it would be. I was passionately in love with my children.  I loved their little bodies and their adorable faces, I loved their dependence on me, I loved their energy and their sweetness and their bottomless curiousity about everything.  I considered motherhood the biggest  --  and best --  job I would ever have.

Marriage, on the other hand, was the biggest disappointment of my life. It hadn't taken long to realize that I had absolutely nothing in common with the man I'd married. The Husband spent most of his time and money at the local tavern. For most of those years I had no phone, no car, no money of my own, no friends: it was just the babies and me in a tiny little three bedroom house. It was a peculiarly isolated existence, but I credit some of the closeness the kids and I share, even now, to those early years alone together.

After a few years I grew to loathe my marriage -- and my husband -- but I felt trapped.

Shortly after our son was born in 1986, my husband was suddenly fired from his job because of his drinking. He went on unemployment and steadfastly refused to look for work. Beer drinking became his fulltime job, basically. This was the last straw, as far as I was concerned. I packed up the kids (ages four, three and three months), applied for public assistance and moved the four of us into a cramped, moldy little apartment not far from the South Seattle neighborhood where I'd grown up.  The Hub went to live with friends. 

I hated being on welfare. It was a terrible blow to my pride: every time I went to the store and paid for our groceries with food stamps, it seemed, the checkout clerk would turn out to be somebody I went to high school with. Plus it was tough raising three growing children on five hundred dollars a month. Soon I began to supplement my meager income by doing a little under-the-table babysitting for some of the other tenants in the apartment complex. 

The kids and I got by. Parts of it were fun, actually: I liked being in charge of my own life, for one thing. And I loved living the 'single' life, without my husband underfoot. 

The Hub and I were separated for a full year. I started divorce proceedings twice, but could never seem to find the heart to go through with it ... mainly (I told myself) because of the special bond between my infant son and his father. Eventually The Hub got a new job and made a sincere attempt to clean up his act. "Give me another chance," he begged, and I felt myself relenting.  In late 1987 I went off public assistance, and The Hub and the kids and I moved into a rental house together in SeaTac, WA.  Secretly I worried that I might be passing up my last chance at freedom and happiness, but it seemed like the noble, selfless,You-made-your-bed-now-cry-in-it thing to do.

Things coasted along for another couple of years. My babysitting evolved into a fulltime daycare business, which kept me busy, provided a marginal income of my own, and allowed me to be at home with my own kids, who remained the center of my universe.  My husband was still drinking, but at least he was drinking at home now, rather than sitting around in a tavern all the time.

I was drinking too, but felt my problem was much less "serious" than his ... mainly because *I* only drank once or twice a week: only on the weekends, never hard alcohol, and almost never in front of the kids.  I took weird comfort in the fact that his dysfunction far eclipsed my own.

     *     *     *     *     *     *

My beloved Grandma died in 1991 and left me a small inheritance. By that time I wanted out of the daycare business: I was tired of changing poopy diapers and cutting peanut butter sandwiches into triangles all day long. It had been thirteen years since I'd last worked in an office, though, and my clerical skills were hopelessly outdated. So I used a chunk of my inheritance money to go to a local business school and learn how to use a computer. I knew absolutely nothing about computers at the time, but I understood that if I wanted to compete in today's job market, I was going to have to have to learn. 

What can I tell you? It was love at first byte. 

The very first time I typed a string of words onto a keyboard and saw them magically appear on the monitor in front of me,  I was hooked. By the time I graduated from the school, four months later, I not only had the skills to look for a job  --  I'd also acquired a new passion. I soon landed a secretarial job at a local phone company ... AND I'd bought my first home computer.

I started feeling very much in control of my life and circumstances, and once again began giving thought to extricating myself from a joyless marriage.

But then, in June of 1995, my husband suddenly checked himself into a local hospital for four weeks of inpatient alcohol and drug treatment. (His employer had given him an ultimatum: rehab or unemployment.)  This was an utterly unexpected development: I had assumed he would eventually drink and drug himself to death (and that we would be chained to each other in marriage until that happened). Sobriety changed him dramatically.  He suddenly became quieter, calmer, more solitary, more responsible about things. He worked nights and I worked days, so we didn't see each other much: we spoke on the phone a couple of times every day, talking about groceries and schedules and housework, but that was about the extent of our daily contact.  When he was home, he spent his time puttering around in the garage, chain-smoking Marlboros and watching sports on TV. I was proud of him, and so were the kids, but it didn't change the fact that I was still wildly unhappy in the marriage. I want to be very clear here: he wasn't a monster.  He was an OK person.  We just didn't connect on any level that mattered.  During fifteen years of marriage, for instance,  he had never showed the slightest interest in anything I'd written.  I practically begged him to read my journal, many times over the years, but he wouldn't. 

"Too many words," he said.

Too many words. Jesus.

There are never "too many words." Never never never never never never never never never never never never never never never never never never never never never never never never never never never never never never never never never never never never never never never.  Words were "it" for me!  Words were what I fed on!  Words were what fueled me, drove me, energized me, pulled me, worked me, fixed me  ...  and the fact that he didn't *get it*  was the biggest saddest "Oh-Shit-I've-Really-Fucked-Up" realization of my entire life.

But there still didn't seem to be much I could do about it.

I figured that love and romance would never again be a part of my life, and I consciously made the decision, then and there, to focus on other things. Motherhood, mostly. My job. My writing.  Running a household. Trying to create a decent life for my children. Trying to grow as a person.  

 And then ...  "SecraTerri"  was born.

     *     *     *     *     *     *

I sat at work the morning of August 17th, 1995, and literally flipped a coin between Prodigy (heads) and AOL (tails).  The coin landed tails-end-up.

I'd wanted to go online for a couple of years, intrigued by tales of "e-mail" and "chat rooms" and vast software libraries, available for the downloading.  The installation went off without a hitch (or glitch), and the next thing I knew, I was in something called The Lobby, tentatively typing SecraTerri's first online words.

"Hello. I'm new to AOL."

I exultantly gathered my family around the computer and said, "Looky!" The response was  tepid, to say the least.

Daughters #1 and #2 : "Big deal, Mom."
Son # Only : "Yawn."
The Anti-Husband : "How much is this gonna cost?"
SecraTerri (naively) : "About fifty bucks a month."

I goofed around for the next few days in The New Members Lounge, talking to fellow newbies and looking for other interesting places on AOL.  I was specifically looking for music or writing-related areas and/or places where I could chat with other moms of teenagers. (My *interests* were quite pure then.) To my total amazed delighted astonishment, I discovered that cyber quite handily filled in a lot of the blank spots in my life. Every time I ran into another kindred soul, my imagination, my brain, my hormones switched into Zoom Mode. It kept me happy and busy and entertained. It got me writing again. It aroused me, occasionally (causing the A.H. to become the startled recipient of thirty seconds' of my romantic attention). All of it seemed quite harmless ...

...  idiotically expensive, of course -- $400-$500 per month AOL bills began adding up -- but harmless nonetheless.

One day one of my new AOL friends e-mailed me.  "There's an area in Clubs & Interests called 'Baby Boomers' that has some good message boards," the e-mail said. This sounded OK.  I didn't have a clue what a "message board" was, but I figured it was worth investigating. I started perusing the Baby Boomers message boards every day, posting letters about 60's rock, Worst Albums of All Time, 60's TV shows, parenting issues, etc. One evening when I was looking at the Baby Boomer Welcome Screen, I noticed a little button that said "Chat." It was a Friday night, I was home alone, I had a little cheap chablis in me, I was in the mood to talk to people ... so I pushed the button.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

The Baby Boomer Chat Room immediately became my home-away-from-home.  I discovered that I had a talent for entertaining people with quick typing and lively wordplay   ...  especially if I had a glass (or eleven) of cheap chablis in me.  I dove headfirst into the total *cyber experience,* replete with friendships, cliques, popularity contests, rivalries ...

...  and romances.

Eventually the inevitable happened:  after a year of more or less innocent online flirtation(s) with men in the chat room, I fell madly in love with a fellow Baby Boomer.

The fact that we were both married seemed irrelevant: we were convinced that our love transcended stuff like geographical distance, career concerns, family obligations, marriage vows. We spent some furtive IRL time together -- in exotic far-off places like the Caribbean, New Orleans, Niagara Falls, Pittsburgh -- and for me, it was like waking up after a lifelong coma. I was in love -- genuinely in love -- for the very first time in my life. Nothing that had come before could compare, not even my marriage. (Or perhaps I should say ESPECIALLY not my marriage.) It was every connection I had ever longed for -- romantic, sexual, spiritual, emotional, intellectual, physical -- all rolled into one impossibly sweet, terrible, wonderful, complex, perfect, problematic relationship. Whenever we were together, I came alive. Whenever we parted at the airport at the end of one of our illicit weekends, I died all over again.

After a few months we got caught, and it was over, and my heart was left in ruins.

     *     *     *     *     *     *

When the affair ended, I sank into a prolonged depression.  I began drinking more heavily than at any other time in my life. As long as I was drunk, I could function/I could sleep without dreaming/I could pretend I wasn't completely miserable. I was sick all the time: chronic bronchitis, gall bladder problems, hangovers, high blood pressure.  My professional life suffered, and I was constantly in danger of losing my job. 

Worst of all, I stopped being an effective mother. My son told me that he often heard me crying in my sleep during those dark days.

My marriage limped along for awhile. My husband seemed willing to forgive my infidelity, as long as I followed his bazillion-page "List Of Rules," taped to the wall above my computer. ("No computer after 9:00 p.m., no going anywhere in the car without one of the kids, no phone calls unless Im home.") I pretended to go along with these new restrictions, without complaint, but it was clear to me that it was time to break free.

I wasn't sure how I was going to accomplish this.  I just knew that unless I ran somewhere  -- anywhere -- I was going to die.

     *     *     *     *     *     *

A well-meaning friend decided that the best way for me to get over my failed online romance  was to plunge immediately into a NEW one.

"You'll like this guy," she said. "He's practically lives next door to you."

As a matter of fact he didn't live 'practically next door' -- he lived in Oregon, two hundred miles away: a heck of a long way to go just to borrow a cup of sugar -- but at least we were in the same time zone. She introduced the two of us via e-mail, and we struck up a cautiously cordial online correspondence. Things heated up fast. Within weeks he was telling me he loved me. Within a month, he was saddling up the white horse. I mispresented myself like crazy, of course: I was the beautiful, emotionally fragile damsel in distress, trapped in a loveless marriage, desperately in need of a strong man with a gentle heart.  I was just as dishonest with myself.  In an effort to recreate the love affair that had died, I ascribed all sorts of characteristics and virtues to The Oregon Boyfiend that simply weren't there. (He and my long-lost love had the same first name, for instance, which I interpreted as a *sign* that this new romance was Meant To Be.) I knew absolutely nothing about this guy, basically ... but I didn't care. I'd decided that he was my get out of jail free card.

The morning of my sixteenth wedding anniversary, I kissed my sleeping children goodbye, took a last look around my house and went off to my office, where I informed my boss that I would be taking "a late lunch."

Two days later I was waking up in Oregon.

My family was devastated, of course. I was too numb for the first few weeks -- unable to believe I'd actually done such a terrible thing -- to feel one way or the other. My eldest daughter considered me dead. "I have no mother," she furiously hissed in the one and only e-mail I received from her during the first couple of months after I left. I communicated with my other children as often as I could, primarily through e-mail. They seemed to forgive me. They even seemed to understand why I left: Mom's unhappiness had hardly been a secret around our house. But we were all a long, long way from OK, and I knew I was to blame for that. In my worst moments I could hear Grandma Vert on her deathbed seven years earlier, holding my hand and whispering, "Terri Lynn .... you are a wonderful, wonderful mother." Her dying words had seemed like a benediction then: now, they were an indictment.

The Oregon Boyfiend and I were a disaster from the very start. We had discovered, within days of my moving into his cramped apartment, that we were not merely from different planets ... we were from completely different solar systems. In MY solar system, for instance, no one gave a fuck whether or not you burp the Tupperware. I hated his music, his guns, his obsessive tidiness, his inflexible Young Republican view of the world. He hated my music, my computer friends, my makeup, my 'leap-and-the-net-will-appear' philosophy of life. I thought he was prissy, pretentious and humorless. He thought I was lazy, messy and utterly self-absorbed.

We were both right.

Still, we soldiered on for a few months, trying to make something out of this weird new relationship of ours. I got a job answering phones at a sports knife manufacturer in Oregon City, and the Boyfiend and I signed a one-year lease together on a bigger apartment. I knew that we had no real future -- I'm pretty sure he knew it, too -- but I figured that if I could just hang on for a while, until my divorce was final and I had some money saved and I'd regained some control over my own life, then I could decide what came next.

*       *       *       *       *       *

Several months after I moved to Oregon, my long-lost online love contacted me, out of the blue.

Actually -- if I'm going to be honest here -- it wasn't so 'out of the blue' as all that. I had never stopped thinking about him, missing him, pining for him, wondering about him. In the year since we'd broken up, I'd given in to the occasional Stoopid Impulse: asking mutual online friends about him, knowing full well that they would relay my questions to him. Calling his office in Pennsylvania and asking for him, then hanging up the phone before he could answer. Anonymously mailing a page of sheet music to his work address: one of *our* special songs, a private joke just between the two of us, so he couldn't fail to understand it had come from me. So when he i.m.'d me that afternoon in April, it wasn't a complete surprise.

Within twenty-four hours, we were feverishly planning a rendezvous in Chicago.

I told the Oregon Boyfiend that I was going to Seattle to visit my children. (Like my ex-husband before him, he never even questioned my going away for a weekend without him.) I told my boss the same story. I told my family that I was going back east to visit "a friend." I told a couple of trusted online friends the real story, just in case the airplane blew up. Figuring I had all of my bases covered, I took the bus to PDX and got on a plane to Chicago.

Our reunion was 72 hours of sex, tears, apologies and promises, followed by the requisite tearful parting at the airport at the end of the weekend. I came home determined to find a way for us to be together permanently. Now that I was divorced, I figured, it would simply be a matter of getting him to leave his wife and six children and commit to a life with me.

In the meantime, of course ... there was still the matter of The Oregon Boyfiend.

It was almost midnight by the time I got home. When I quietly let myself into our apartment, I was shocked to see all of my personal belongings stacked in a haphazard pile, in the middle of the living room ... and the Oregon Boyfiend sitting on the couch, in the darkness, waiting for me.

"How was Chicago?" he asked, murderously calm.

      *          *          *           *            *

Two weeks later I was moving into The Tree House.

The Oregon Boyfiend, rocked as he was by my infidelity -- he'd discovered my true whereabouts that weekend by reading my e-mail -- nevertheless allowed me to sleep on his couch for the next couple of weeks, until I found a place to live. He took me around town looking at apartments, he loaned me money for a deposit, he helped me move my meager belongings into the new place. The price I paid for all of this 'kindness' was being forced to listen to a constant litany of my shortcomings ... as a girlfriend, as a mother, as a Democrat, as a human being. In a weird way, I think he actually liked me better when he hated me. He set up my computer for me, one afternoon while I was at work, and when I came home that night I saw that the Windows marquee screensaver was running. "LIAR!" it screamed. "LIAR LIAR PANTS ON FIRE!" I put up with his oddball abuse because I felt I deserved it ... and because he was the only 'friend' I had in Oregon.

I called my little third-floor apartment "The Tree House" because it sat on top of a hill overlooking historic Oregon City.  When you opened up the curtains, all you saw were treetops: it really was a little bit like living in a tree house. It was 600 square feet for $600 a month -- twice as much as I could actually afford on my pitiful knife company salary -- but the moment I saw it, I had to have it. I craved the quiet, the space, the solitude, the emptiness. This was the first time that I'd ever lived by myself -- a lifelong fantasy -- and in spite of the fact that I was broke, hungry, sick, lonely and almost completely furniture-less, most of the time ... it immediately turned into one of the more interesting adventures of my life.

It was while I was living in the Tree House that my online journal *FootNotes* was born. What initially began as a means of archiving old paper journals (while telegraphing daily "I'm still breathing" messages to worried family and friends) swiftly grew into a personal and creative passion that endures to this day.

Unfortunately, it was also while I was living in the Tree House that a lifetime of problem drinking blossomed into fullblown dysfunction. While I was living with The Oregon Boyfiend, I hid my alcoholism as much as possible.  He would order one beer with dinner, for instance. So would I, but secretly I would be dying to have twelve. He liked expensive, private-label wines in little snooty bottles, while I craved big boxes of cheap chablis. One martini was more than enough for him, while I longingly eyeballed the entire pitcher. I didn't want him to know about this hugely dysfunctional part of my life, of course, so for as long as I lived with him I kept my problem -- and my cravings -- well-hidden.

Now that I was living on my own, though, there wasn't anything (or anybody) holding me back.

At first it was fun. I especially loved the weekends, when I could hole up in my beloved little apartment with my computer and my boombox and a refrigerator full of beer and wine, and I could drink and listen to music and screw around online for 48 hours straight, without interruption. The problem is that I quickly tried to turn every night into a "weekend" night. Going to work with a toxic hangover became the rule rather than the exception.

I tried to quit drinking several times that summer -- usually while kneeling on the bathroom floor, praying for swift and merciful death -- but as soon as the hangover passed, the drinking resumed.

There was no single incident or motivation that led to my getting sober that summer, but rather a series of incidents and motivations, intertwined. I got tired of feeling sick and exhausted all the time. I looked like hell. I had no money, and my job was suffering. I missed my children. The online lover had vanished into the ether for the last time, leaving me heartbroken one final time. The Oregon Ex-Boyfiend regularly made fun of my halfhearted efforts to get sober. "You'll never quit drinking," he said matter-of-factly. I ached to prove him wrong. In my darker moments I considered a permanent solution to my pain: in more rational moments, though, I knew that this would create more problems than it would solve.

Why not just quit drinking? suggested the rational voice. For real this time.

One night -- without fanfare or forethought -- I simply walked into the kitchen, dumped out my half-empty glass of chablis and said "That's it. I'm done."

And that was it. I was done.

At first I didn't tell anybody what I was doing. I confided in no one. I endured a spectacularly brutal physical withdrawal, alone in the Tree House -- I told my boss (and my website readers) that I 'had the flu' -- and when it was over I set about looking for ways to make sobriety bearable. I spent hours at the library and on the Internet, reading everything I could find about alcoholism, addiction, recovery, recovery-related health issues. I decided against joining any organized twelve-step program, even though in retrospect I can see that it might have helped me, at least in the beginning. This was something I wanted to do "by myself," I rationalized. Plus I was dealing with Higher Power issues at the time: my faith in God was on the wane, and I hadn't yet found anything to replace Him. Eventually, though, my desire -- my need -- to talk about what I was going through, with someone who understood the process, overcame my need for privacy and secrecy. I needed to find a support system outside of myself if this sobriety stuff was going to work.

Enter DRaftervoi.

     *        *         *          *         *         *

My divorce was final early in the summer of 1998, and I was fully single for the first time since high school.

No husband. No boyfriend(s). No goofy online entanglements . . . no secret crushes on co-workers or neighbors or random grocery store clerks ... no *romantic nonsense* of any kind. I was amazed to discover that I enjoyed the feeling a lot more than I'd expected to. I made a conscious decision, then and there, to remain single for as long as possible: to focus on my recovery, my children, my writing, my job. I wanted to learn how to be a whole person in my own right, as opposed to being half of a couple.

DRaftervoi -- "Dave" to his friends, online and offline -- was an old online pal of mine who lived in the Bay Area of California. We'd met during the summer of 1995, as part of the original Baby Boomer Chat Room group. Right from the start we'd enjoyed a bond of friendship and mutual interests, principally music and writing. Our friendship had never been romantic in nature -- mainly because we'd both been busy with other online involvements -- but ours was the sort of connection that endured in spite of periodic lapses in communication.

Early in the summer of 1998 he sought me out online, after several months of silence. He'd heard that I was living alone, up there in Oregon, and that I was going through a tough time. Was there anything he could do to help? A recovering alcoholic himself -- he had about a year of *sobriety seniority* over me -- he immediately zeroed in on the crux of my problem that summer. "Are you drinking too much?" he asked me point blank.  I told him the truth. There followed a series of nonthreatening, nonjudgemental nonlectures on the benefits of sobriety, and on the damage alcohol does to the mind and body, and on his own personal experiences with the recovery process. Later -- after I'd been sober long enough to convince myself that maybe it was actually going to stick this time -- he was one of the first people I confided in.

David immediately assumed the role of my personal Long Distance Recovery Coach.

Occasional phone calls now became nightly phone marathons. We would talk for hours about recovery-related health issues, and about taking responsibility for your life, and about finding ways to make karmic restitution along the way. He encouraged me to rebuild my relationships with my children, to take better care of myself, to start saving a little money, to look to the future instead of mourning the past. He was an early champion of my website, urging me to use the online journal as a tool for healing. I took his pager number with me everywhere I went, in case I experienced a moment of weakness or crisis: once I paged him as I stood outside a grocery store, tearfully battling the impulse to go inside and buy a bottle of Mountain Chablis. Any time I expressed concern over his mounting long-distance bills, he would brush it aside. "Look," he'd say. "The way I see it, it would cost $2,000 to put you through rehab. We're getting off cheap here." In addition to the phone support, he also mailed me little care packages -- mix tapes, handwritten letters, postcards, photos -- and sent me links to websites that dealt with nutrition and exercise.

It was a very thorough -- and a very personalized -- recovery support system.

Through it all, we were very careful not to cross the line between platonic friendship and something deeper. "This isn't a romance," he wrote to me once, after we'd had a minor misunderstanding about something or other. It soon became our catch phrase ... especially whenever there were the occasional unbidden stirrings of "something deeper." "This isn't a romance," we would remind each other, and then our friendship would get right back on track and we could continue to focus on the thing that was most important to both of us: staying sober.

        *        *       *       *        *

"Did you know that a roundtrip ticket from Oakland to Portland costs less than a hundred bucks?" David wrote me one day.

"I know it now," I replied.

We were toying with the idea of having him fly to Oregon for a day ... just to have lunch, and to meet each other face-to-face finally. I had no problem with the idea of meeting him in person, but personally I thought it sounded like a waste of airfare ... and opportunity. Why fly up for one measly lunch? Why not make it a whole weekend, and really spend some time together?

"I think we can handle it," I said. After all, this wasn't a romance.

Over the next few days we fine-tuned the plans. As I was far and away the more flexible of the two of us, schedule-wise -- you don't have a lot of committments when you live alone, hundreds of miles away from your family -- we decided to fly me down to California, rather than having him come north to Oregon. I would be staying for an entire weekend, from Friday night until Monday morning. (Hallowe'en weekend, as it turned out.) He could show me all around the Bay Area -- the Golden Gate Bridge, Chinatown, the Jefferson Airplane House, Haight-Ashbury, all the places I'd always wanted to see, since my very early Longing-To-Be-A-Hippie days -- and after a long day of sightseeing we could sit down and talk, really talk, over Chinese food and iced tea, about things that were important to us both. Recovery. Music. Our children. Our plans for the future.

At the end of the day I would, of course, be sleeping on his living room sofa. 

On the face of it, I was really excited and happy about the prospect of spending time with my best friend. As the weekend of our visit grew closer, though, I began to wonder if this was such a good idea after all. Not because I was afraid we might accidentally sleep together -- I knew that wasn't going to happen -- but because he might find me so boring and so quiet in person, sober, face-to-face, that it would permanently sour our friendship. And if something happened to our friendship ... my recovery might be in jeopardy. I wasn't sure if it was a risk worth taking.

But of course I got on the airplane anyway.

    *      *        *        *        *         *

David and I were married on July 21, 2001 in my sister's backyard in Auburn, Washington. Our brother-in-law Tim officiated at the ceremony, my father walked me down the aisle -- or, more accurately, he escorted me across the lawn to the flower-bedecked altar -- and my two beautiful daughters stood up with me as maids-of-honor. In the 'audience,' along with our parents and our children and assorted other special family members, were three of our best friends from the very same chat room where we'd first met, six years earlier. The Ex-Husband even showed up for a slice of wedding cake, after the ceremony.

What can I tell you?

It was love at first sight for us both. I hadn't flown to California that weekend, three years earlier, looking to find true love. I wasn't looking for sex or romance or emotional entanglement of any kind. All I wanted was a pleasant weekend with my friend ... and a little Kung Pao Chicken, on the side. But when I saw David in the airport for the very first time, striding down the terminal towards me, smiling ... something in my heart whispered This is the guy.

By the end of that evening, he held my heart (and other interesting body parts) in his hands.

By the end of that first weekend, we were making plans to move me to California.

By the end of November, we were loading up all of my personal belongings into the back of a U-Haul truck, preparing for the twelve-hour drive from Oregon City to Oakland. It wasn't an easy decision for either one of us. Quitting my job was tough. Leaving my beloved little apartment was tough. Calling my children and my parents and telling them that I was moving to another state to live with a man I had met online -- again -- was one of the more excruciatingly difficult things I've ever done. My family, my friends, my co-workers all thought I was insane. (There were moments, frankly, as I packed all of my earthly belongings for the fourth time in two years, when *I* agreed with them.)  David faced similar obstacles and objections. There were people on both sides who were firmly against the idea of the two of us being together, and who went to astonishing lengths to try and prevent that from happening. We ignored them, basically, and followed our hearts.

Two years after I moved to California, David proposed. I said 'yes.'

When it came time for me to read my portion of the wedding vows, I handed my bouquet to my oldest daughter, unfolded the sweaty piece of notepaper I had palmed in my hand, and read aloud in a shaky voice:

David:

You told me, three years ago, that this 'isn't a romance.' I didn't believe you.

You told me that I had the power to change my life, and the lives of those I love, and that I could build a life of health and integrity and promise, one day at a time. I didn't believe you then, either.

As it turns out, you were wrong about the 'romance' ... but you were right about everything else.

I owe so much of what is good and strong and joyous about my life today to the support and caring you offered to me then, and in all the days since then." [Here I nearly broke down.] "My heart is filled with gratitude and love.

In my darkest hour, you took my hand and became my friend. Today -- in my brightest hour -- you take my hand and become my husband.

I look forward to spending the rest of my life with you, living together in health, integrity and promise ... and with the deepest and most profound love my heart has to offer, forever.

It was so ironic. Here I'd found my soulmate: the one true love of my heart, the man who makes me want to be a better person every single day, my very own honest-to-god Prince Charming ...

... but only after I'd finally stopped looking for him.

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