I am getting married in one week. Seven days.  And I am scared shitless.

Don’t get me wrong.  Jamie is wonderful – my first love, my college sweetheart.  He is smart and funny.  He makes me laugh until my ribs ache.  He is kind and loves me fiercely.  He is steady and stable and reliable….and therein lies the problem. I do not know how to be in a relationship with a steady, stable, reliable man.

Being with Jamie is like trying to speak a foreign language, with a vocabulary limited to kindergarten words.  I am fluent in drama and consider “pick myself up by my bootstraps” my second language.  He refuses to converse in my native tongue and only uses conversational “bootstraps” when I give him no choice.  Drama is not in his nature and he wants to help me up when I perceive that I have hit rock bottom.  He reminds me that there are two bootstraps and two of us.  A weird and crazy philosophy based upon the idea that we are partners.

I believe my issues stem from my broken “picker.”  I gravitate to and pick men who need me – to rescue, to support, to “fix,” to encourage, to force them to meet their potential.  Jamie picked me.  He does not need me in that gut-wrenching, broken, rock-bottom way with which I am comfortable, familiar.  My “picker” spins like a broken compass when I am near him and cannot locate in him  that fundamental brokenness that screams out for my healing touch.  And that’s when I get “twirly.”  I find that I cannot breathe, and the world spins a bit too fast for me to maintain my equilibrium.  I do not know how to walk a landscape of quiet fields and rolling hills; I desperately need those familiar mountainous crags that force me to cling to their sheer faces with nail-grinding tenacity.  I know how to climb mountains, even when – especially when – the peaks are unattainable.  I do not know how to maneuver in a landscape of peace.

When I was five, my babysitter told me that boys are good and girls are bad.  She would hold my baby brother to her breast and croon sweet songs to him, from the other side of a locked door.  I would stand on the dark side of that door – I could not reach the light switches and she turned them off on purpose – and absorb the lessons of less-than.  I can remember lying on the ground, pressing my face to the crack between the door and the floor, just so I could see the light and hear her voice.  Nighttime and shadows are scary to a five year old who cannot reach the light switch.  Sometimes she would stop singing, just to remind me that I was not good, that I deserved to be shut out in the dark hallway.

When I was eight, my babysitter told me that boys are good and girls are bad.  She would lift the tail of her shirt and show me the criss-cross web of scars across her back, scars that her father gave her because she was a girl.  He did not whip her brothers.  She liked to remind me that I was lucky that she did not whip me til I bled, that she was strong and held herself in check.  She reminded me that I would always be less-than.  She loved me in spite of me and did her dead-level best to “fix” me.

When I was twelve, my babysitter told me that boys are good and girls are bad.  Then she told me she loved me, held me tight in a hug of fierceness, and moved away, leaving me with the ingrained lessons of my childhood.  Lessons that were a tight, hard knot in the center of my being, a knot that was better left ignored.  I did not know how to heal myself, so I became desperate to heal those around me.  And my “picker” was born.

My first marriage was a perfect fit.  He needed me.  He had potential that drew me like a magnet and he was broken beyond repair.  Together, we were planted firmly at ground zero, rock-bottom.  My challenge was to drag him with me up the mountain.  And by God, I tried.  I became both husband and wife, father and mother, therapist and whipping post, with a single-minded goal to cure him of his addictions and lead him to the fullness of his talent and potential.  If I focused on him, I did not have to focus on myself.

And then I had a child.  A girl.  Suddenly my lessons of childhood, of less-than, of brokenness were rocked to the core.  My girl was magical, she was more-than.  She reached into my center and began to loosen the knot that had been ignored for so long.  And in doing so, the familiar landscape of drama and fight-for-life desperation, began to be uncomfortable.  I could not “fix” another person.  I could not drag my husband, kicking and screaming, to fulfill his potential.  I could not make our home a landscape of peace – a landscape that terrified me, but one in which my child deserved to grow.

And I began to heal and un-knot the lessons of my childhood.  This time, when Jamie picked me, I was ready – to have a partner, to be healthy, to be at peace.

But I am one week away from marrying this amazing man, and I have found that the knot is smaller, but it is still there.  I have come so far, but I am terrified that my new language of peace and happiness is not as strong as my native tongue.  Ingrained lessons of my childhood seek me out in the middle of the night.  They hug me fiercely and remind me that I am less-than, that drama is my comfort zone, that I cannot maintain a partnership with a man who does not need to be “fixed.”  A relationship that does not center around desperation cannot mask my feelings of inadequacy, and this is more frightening than being in darkness, too small to reach the switch.

Then Jamie reaches high above my head, and he flips the switch and I am bathed in light.  He sees the knot – he saw the knot three decades ago, before it began to loosen and shrink – and he is not worried.  He hugs me fiercely and tells me that I am more-than, that he will walk through the terrifying landscape of peace with me.  He will hold my hand and stay beside me, even  if I get scared and desperately seek the drama lurking high in the mountains.

You may not have noticed, but I did not write this in my native tongue, or in the language in which I am conversational.  I am learning a new language – a healing language that ranks right up there with Mandarin in difficulty.  But by God, I am learning it and the vocabulary is pithy and versatile and freeing, and it allows me to say that I am getting married in one week.  Seven days.  And I am scared shitless.  And that is ok.  That is absolutely ok.