Unrecognizable

Who’s that? he asked as he pointed to the photo of me and my daughter taken five years ago.

“That’s the kid,” I said, puzzled that he was having trouble recognizing her.

“Not her. Who’s that? She’s beautiful,” he clarified.

“What?! That’s me!” I said as I laughed at the fact that my boyfriend didn’t recognize the me of a few years and a few pounds more ago. It was a photo of me from another life, when I was still married. Unhappily so.

I’m delighted and relieved he can’t recognize that me. I can’t recognize that me either – the me who was so weary and lifeless from the Bataan death march that my marriage had become. Ok, perhaps my hyperbole is a bit over the top – I *do* still recognize that me. In fact, every time I get a glimpse of her, she makes me wince and cringe and shake my head in disbelief. On a few occasions, after having thought long and hard about her, I may have lost consciousness and spoken in tongues.

But she also makes me very grateful that that part of my life is behind me, getting smaller and smaller in the rearview mirror as I push the gas pedal to the floor, racing toward my new life faintly visible in the distant horizon, but still miles away. When I think about whom I was then and who I am now, I feel confident I will never allow myself to feel that “stuck” again. Oh, don't get me wrong. I guarantee I will continue to f*ck up in forehead-slapping ways and struggle to get my shit together on a regular basis, because life is messy and full of inviting wrong turns, and I need material to keep feeding this hungry blog.

I just mean that getting a second chance at something as big as L-O-V-E is a gift I can’t imagine taking for granted. It's like being the lucky recipient of a kidney transplant or the person whose heart stopped for ten minutes, but lived to tell about it. Something that monumental. Something that huge. What kind of a dick would you have to be to take a second chance like that for granted?