Free Sleeping Solo: One Woman's Journey into Life after Marriage by Audrey Faye Page A

road.
    Ground zero.   I know, I know.   I just enticed you in the door with
promises of happy dancing in the streets and shiny, pretty things in the grass.   Don’t worry, we’ll get there.   But first I have
to take you back to the 2nd of December and the bomb blast that took out everything
good in my marriage and set a whole lot of other things on fire too.
    I’m not going to get into the specifics of what went
down.   Baring my soul is one thing,
but I don’t intend to strip several other people naked too.   What matters is that the blast was big
and ugly and very, very permanent.   There would be no gluing the shrapnel of my marriage back together, no
repairing the shreds of the intimate connection I had belonged to for more than
twelve years.
    If I could have run for the hills at that point, I would
have.   I’d have gotten as far away
as I could from the damage, built a really bad-ass brick wall up to the sky, and started a new life.   Everything in me screamed for distance
and safety.
    But I couldn’t do that.  
    I have two kids—and the guy who had just detonated the
explosion is their dad.   We were a
family of four who had just been blown to smithereens.   Which meant I had responsibilities, and
my heart, killer bruises and all, knew it.   I had to stay at ground zero and keep
the promises I’d made, twice, on the glorious, crazy, life-changing days when
each of my children were born.
    I’m good in a crisis, the kind of person you want in charge
of triage and handing out the bandages and setting up search parties to find
traces of life under the rubble.   So
I started taking action.   Research,
lawyers, house hunting—applying bandages to the worst of the bleeding and
desperately trying to figure out how to keep as little of this from landing on
my kids as humanly possible.  
    I also had a book to release.   Oh, and Christmas.   Of all the pure, clear instincts that
rose up right after the explosion, one of the fiercest was that I would not let
my kids’ world fall apart during the holiday they and I love so very much.
    So most people, watching from the outside, saw a flurry of
action.   And rightly so, I
think—my house was on fire.
    Here’s what people didn’t see so much in those early days.
    I was cold.   Deep-freeze winter-tundra cold in every cell of my body.   I’ve never been so cold in my entire
life, and that’s saying something when you grew up in the Canadian
prairies.   Emotional-onset
hypothermia—my body’s way of responding to the blast that had just hit.  
    I might have managed to ignore the chattering cold, even as
I layered on sweaters and socks and huddled under piles of blankets, trying
desperately to shelter my inner fires.   But the cold came with a friend—I also wasn’t eating.
    You have to understand—I can always eat, and when
things get tough, I comfort eat.   Food is one of my constants, and if you’d asked me how I expected to
respond in the days following nuclear meltdown, I would have sighed and started
inventorying my chocolate stash.  
    So when all I could manage to get down for days at a time
were small bowls of yogurt and a little fruit, it made a very big
impression.   I lost weight,
fast—not something that had ever happened in my world.   And all this on the heels of a doctor’s
visit in November where it was clear I was borderline anemic and fighting
adrenal fatigue.  
    My body was teetering on the brink of something dark and
dangerous.
    Which was a huge gift—I just didn’t know it then.   Because it’s pretty much impossible to
ignore your body turning into an ice cube.
    The monsters under the bed.   I’m one of those people who spends a lot of time wandering my inner landscapes.   Even as my teeth chattered, I knew I was
scared, and I knew quite a bit of why.
    The dangers stalking my kids were the most obvious of the
monsters.
    My son is severely autistic.   He’s a gorgeous little guy with brown
curls and big