ERNIE AND ERNESTINA: Searching

Book Two, Chapter 305: On, and On, and On

When I read John and Linda Friel’s Adult Children: Secrets of a Dysfunctional Family and realized I was an Adult Child, everything fell into place for me. Their book gave me the information I needed to begin the work of building myself, of making myself whole. Of healing myself.

In slowly releasing myself from an addiction to relationships, I find myself better able to detach from other things. I haven’t bought semi-sweet chocolate morsels or a jar of Nutella for weeks — not that I’m off sugar completely. Just two days ago I stopped by my favorite bakery for three dozen fruit slices, which the bakery makes only during the holiday season.

I mailed a dozen in a Thanksgiving package to my sister Tish and her husband, David, who live in Virginia, and took the remaining two dozen to my Twelve-Step meeting last night. I’ll eat a sweet if I’m able to eat it slowly and in moderation. If I can’t, then I don’t bring it into my home.

I’m building relationships with others — something I didn’t bother to do before Ernie died. He was enough for me. All others were either superfluous or incidental, brief encounters. Mostly, I was a phony.

“Quit fooling me, Ernestina,” Ernie said to me in the hospital.

I don’t want to fool myself or anyone else ever again.

I’m more at peace. I trust that happiness will come. Or, perhaps what I feel is a quiet kind of happiness.

I accept my life as it is now. I work on my spiritual progress, and that work goes on, and on, and on.