The Drawing Table: Welcome Back, Mabel's House

Mabel was my first dog. She was a spicy schnauzer mix.

Mabel’s House was my first house, a post-World War II house built in 1949.

Mabel’s House was also the name of my blog.

And for a long time these were memories that really hurt to visit.

By the time I skidded to the end of the runway of my first marriage, there wasn’t much left to mourn in that relationship. After 13 years of marriage, anything mournable had burned down long before our papers ended up in divorce court. But in the years that followed, I mourned Mabel, and I mourned my first house, and I mourned the blog years.

Even though my marriage was mostly on fire every day, I had (and still have) an extraordinary ability to compartmentalize my life. It was a survival skill I learned early, and in some ways it served me well (and in others not so much). I don't actually think compartmentalization is all bad in and of itself. It probably kept me in situations longer than I should have stayed, but it also allowed me to find a lot of happiness in my dog, in my house, and in blogging.

But after all was said and done, I didn’t know how to untangle those carefully compartmentalized rooms in my brain. The divorce didn’t break my heart. But it did evict me from the world I’d painstakingly built to survive it.

The problem wasn’t that I lost myself.

The problem was that my brain filed all those good things under the same folder as my first marriage.

Mabel wasn't just a dog. She was safety and love during an unsafe season.

My house wasn't just a building, it was a place where I could create and make things beautiful when I was also living with a lot of ugliness.

My blog was a place where the things that delighted me were shared and I wasn’t lonely.

It wasn't that those things belonged to my marriage. It's that my brain had associated all of those things together in one giant emotional rat-king. Tug on one tail, and suddenly the whole writhing mess came with it. And that made even thinking about and remembering the joyful things confusingly painful.

It’s taken me over a decade to untangle these things (thanks, therapy and rat-king analogies) and to realize these good things weren't reminders of my marriage. They were the places I'd gone to escape it. And in reality they still belonged to me. They were mine to remember and enjoy.

They always were. And they always will be.

So this past week I sat at my drawing table and created a new “Mabel’s House” complete with Mabel’s happy little face in the front window. But, for anyone that actually knew Mabel, she didn’t have a happy face in the front window. She had a mad face and was usually screaming at whoever walked past.

I loved her. I loved that she was stubborn beyond belief. I loved that when she curled up to snuggle with me and passed gas in her sleep, she would wake up, look at me with utter disdain as if I was the noxious culprit, and jump down to leave in a huff. I loved how she was always going to destroy couch cushions and nobody could make her not.

And I loved that house, with its Mamie Pink tiled bathroom and big windows. I loved the deep scar marks in its wooden floors and the phone nook in the hallway. And I loved my blog, where I wrote every single weekday not because it was an obligation, but because it was a community. It was a place I could obsess about houses, and flea market finds, and gardens, and books, and discover that a lot of other people wanted to obsess with me.

It was a place I was never, ever, lonely.

And now I can still remember and enjoy all of these things, even from a completely different life, even though I’ve moved from Mabel’s House to The Greenhouse. I can do this because I’m living a life where I’m happy and stable and the opposite of lonely.

Frankly, after a summer of everyone working from home and the kids being at home and Kevin dropping his toys exactly where I walk with such precision I’m beginning to suspect he is plotting on me, I understand why Mabel screamed at people walking past the window. Don't get me wrong, I've healed. But I'd also like everyone in this house to vanish for thirty minutes so I can eat an entire bag of saltwater taffy without having to answer a single question.

So cheers to Mabel, and my little pink-bathroom house, and my old blog.

The emotional rat-king has finally been untangled.

I plan to draw, and remember, and revisit Mabel’s House (and those years) whenever I feel like it… with zero emotional toll booths and no detours through divorce court.

These really important memories have been rezoned.