hitting bottom - a stage of the immigration process

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I am married to a Mexican guy who I love with all of my heart.

     This year started out with the babies and I in Mexico with my husband for a “visit”- as some have wrongly stated a honeymoon-type of visit, as if some assumed virgin moment of enlightenment takes place. I returned to my home, everything unchanged, unmoved, but relatively clean as my husband takes care of himself and our home when the kids and I are away. We do not pretend that life is perfect when we are together, or do we over-treat ourselves as would be presumed.

     There is only a short period of time that we are able to be family, so we fight, we love, we cook and do laundry, and we find that some of our best conversations are when we are sitting in the bathroom together. We are just like a normal marriage, a normal family. That is until it ends, the flight date approaches, and that is when normalcy goes and pain overwhelms not just us, but our children. We do not discuss this moment until the day it arrives, we do not linger in the sadness, and we just live.

    Then, the big girl pants are put on, so that I can get through life until next time while I am without him.

This is when my husband takes a deep breath and holds it, as he waves goodbye to his life on the other side of the security check, heading back to America – where he is not welcome.

      The past five months my world has been more hellacious than ever. Concentration on living has become difficult. I lost our baby and I lost some of my closest friends. I started to doubt my abilities in my education and found it a real challenge to push myself through my assignments.

    In the past, words of encouragement to women in this similar situation was an opportunity for me to feel as though that all that I had lived and learned had counted for something, that I could help others who were moving abroad as I did previously without being afraid or lonely, or to comfort those who were enduring separation that could be so traumatic…

    Suddenly it was I who turned to the internet crying out for someone to help me as I fell further and deeper into depression. I drove people away with my sudden loss of humor and strength. I was lost and I lost so much because of it.

Hitting bottom… what happens to a person that hits bottom?

There is a feeling that your life is not really yours.

When there is a lack of control over almost every aspect of your life, you begin to search for a way out.

Do I attend an AA meeting, an NA meeting, or do I walk in to the jailhouse and say please, take me, I did it, I am guilty? Do I run from my friends, from my family, from my school, and from society?

Who and what do I look to that will bring solution to this life, this annoying person that my friends hate, that my family does not respect, that my children pity, that my church ignores, and that society cannot stand…

No one wants you when you loose – there surely is a song somewhere for this moment.

And then there is my husband on the other end of the nightly call, where we get to love, respect, and comfort each other because we are both enduring the same hell.

This is the bottom.