The week that I decided to turn my journal entries into a memoir was an incredibly stressful one.
Lou and I had just come to terms with the fact that the wine company that we started nearly one-year prior was completely out of money. Yep. I know. I just jumped forward on ya.
So allow me to get you all caught up before I continue.
Soon after the tire patching incident, Lou’s business plan miraculously got funded, and everything started to happen rather quickly for a change. We started to get things in motion immediately, and by September of 2015, Lou and I moved into a tiny furnished cottage in the middle of a vineyard in Sonoma, California.
The day we moved in was 44th my birthday, and I felt like Lou had just given me the best gift in the world — a place to call home! Nothing in the cottage belonged to me — and the style of the decor was adorable, but not at all my taste. But none of that mattered — I had a home! And everything about the cottage was perfect!
As soon as we officially moved to the Wine Country, we hit the ground running. Lou never stopped, and looking back, I realize that we almost reached a tipping point of success.
Almost…
But somehow, things just fell off in all the wrong directions right when we needed them to align. For starters, our timing for a start-up like this was bad. You already needed to be sorted by the fourth quarter of a given year to properly launch a wine company — which we know now. And, within weeks of jumping in, we started to realize that some of the key partnerships we set up were incredibly flawed. Oh, and on top of all that, we made every rookie mistake in the book.
The wine industry is unlike any other industry because the laws that govern the distribution of wine and spirits are incredibly nuanced, and every state in the union — and sometimes the counties within a given state — have different laws on their books. So if you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s incredibly easy to do the wrong thing.
Despite all of that, Lou and I both gave the company every part of ourselves, and we did everything we could think of to keep things afloat. But it just wasn’t enough. And our partners (again) were not in the fight with us, and we found ourselves struggling to keep things going all alone.
Please know that I don’t fault anyone for much anymore. You simply can’t know what it’s like to be in anyone else’s shoes, and so I’ve tried to surrender the desire to blame anyone involved in the company for anything they did or didn’t do to add to the downward spiral we were in. However, I still struggle to surrender the blame I put on myself at times. (That’s always the biggest battle I wage in my life to this day…)
But the fact is, a year into the deal, Lou and I finally had to shut things down and step away.
The reality came to us slowly — even though we were never in denial. But when things finally came to an end, it felt like a sucker punch to the gut. We knew that we simply couldn’t leverage anything else to make the company succeed. We were tapped out, and our partners were not interested in staying connected or engaged any longer. Time was ticking down, and we knew we had less than three weeks left to end our latest short-term lease, repack our things into the boxes (that I had preemptively saved under the bed) and load up our SUV for another leg of imposing.
I had just about found the mental edge that I needed to take on this reality when Lou walked into the living room of our cute cottage. I was sitting on the leather sofa, working out a packing strategy in my mind when I looked up at Lou. His face was white, and his eyes looked full of fear.
He said, “Baby. I’m bleeding again — only not from my schmekle this time. I think something might be wrong with my colon.” My body went completely numb.
How many more versions of this unending journey am I supposed to endure before all of the lessons are learned?
It’s like living in the movie Groundhog Day!
The Imposition Tour is never going to end… Ever. I’m absolutely positive!
It turns out that I was right about that last part. As I write this entry, I’m currently living a version of The Imposition Tour. And even while I’m in the middle of it, I can say this with clarity and total conviction:
This seemingly endless journey has really sucked, but, it has also done some good in our lives. It hasn’t been all bad. And even though I really don’t enjoy being financially vulnerable, I do appreciate the grace I’ve gained in my understanding of life’s most complicated seasons.
For one thing, as a result of The Imposition Tour, Lou and I know more about ourselves, and more about how life works, and, I think both Lou and I have accepted certain things about the people we are, and who we’re meant to be in this world. We’ve tried to let go of the desire to “hit it big” again or to even live in a version of our lives where the quarters, dimes, and nickels in my purse are not considered valuable. That’s a work in progress — at least it is for me…
But anyway.
I think Lou and I have both made peace with the fact that each of us is very flawed, but continually hopeful human beings. And even though our marriage is far from perfect, I know that Lou and I are connected to each other in ways that can’t be compromised as easily by trials and tribulations anymore. Lou and I have endured the very worst kind of detours on The Imposition Tour — that took us from richer to poorer, from healthy to sick, from broken and on the way to restored — and on the other side of it all, we’ve discovered a tiny piece of sacred ground between us that only has room enough for God, Lou, and me.
But now if I can just be plain about it…
There is a bone-tired feeling in my body that makes each attempt to figure out our next reality painfully daunting. Plus, I worry. All the time, unfortunately. And. I fret. I hide from people who love me — because sometimes, it’s just too difficult to explain to them how we ended up here again — and, I spend more time than I should wallowing in self-defeat.
I hate being a burden. And, I hate being so needy. It alters how I feel about myself, and it makes me wonder if God is ever going to be able to trust me with the bigger things I hope for in my life. But please believe me when I say that Lou and I both keep trying our best. Neither one of us ever stops trying.
Unfortunately, the unfolding scenario of most of the things we’ve tried in recent years seems to always be the same: Lou and/or I take a leap of faith, and attempt to do something we believe we’re supposed to do; then, after a huge effort, we mess it all up somehow, and we fall into financial ruin or personal conflict. We, of course, rally as best we can to keep it all together, but the thing we tried clearly isn’t meant to be. So we learn a few more lessons, and we apply those lessons in our lives to the best of our ability. But eventually, we realize it’s time to let go, and move on.
Then, after we have no choice but to pack up our car and jump back into The Imposition Tour, Lou starts bleeding from one of his orifices…?
Darn.
However, even though the latest scenario I described earlier in this entry is very familiar to me, God still has a way of surprising me with my own story. With hindsight, I see how God takes me on these internal detours that make me feel totally up-ended and lost. But when I stop and take in the journey one second at a time, I find that I can start to see a different plan unfolding that I didn’t expect. And because it’s God plan, when I manage to get out of the way, I can see that His plan is perfectly executed, and exactly what I really need…
So. Back to the latest health scare. Just before I started working on the memoir that is chronicled in this blog, things only appeared to be exactly like they had been before:
Yes, we were about to shut down our latest company with another fail; yes, we were totally broke; yes, we were ending our lease with another landlord; and yes, we were about to face another leg of imposing with all of our worldly belongings shoved into the back of our car. But even though Lou’s news about his latest bleeding issue caused me to sneak off so I could ugly cry the word “why?” like I was Nancy Kerrigan, Lou didn’t turn out to be sick at all.
He had just eaten the lion’s share of the roasted beets I made for dinner the night before. It was beet juice… Not blood!
Finally! We caught a break!
When that discovery was made, I knew that this latest leg of The Imposition Tour was laced with some fresh layers of spiritual resolution, and some newfound hope that my life lessons wouldn’t be wasted in the heart and mind of God’s very own, hand-picked storyteller anymore.
I had to share the story of the past decade of my life and find the humor, the honesty, the heartbreak, and the clarity in the remembering so that maybe the value of my story could be useful to others – not just to myself. I suddenly realized that God does trust me with big things, and it was time for me to sit down and start writing again… But this time, I needed to write about me. And.
