Making any kind of course correction — for me at least — seems to involve an extreme jerk of the wheel to go in a totally new direction.
I notice that I tend to fret about a decision for a bit, but when I finally make up my mind, I don’t look back. I reset my gauges, and head for my new destination with great gusto. So once I accepted that Lou and I were never going to recover the life we had, I got pretty focused on my purging process. But let me be clear:
It took me close to three years to get to a point of real acceptance.
My grandmother was right about Lou. He’s a very powerful man, and he can build amazing networks of people and companies when he puts his mind to it. He always starts with a huge vision, and he spends very little negative energy thinking up reasons why his ideas can’t be executed. He’s an honest-to-goodness visionary; and, he’s usually on point with what the masses are most interested in. He’s got a sixth sense for marketing and selling…
And, I’d say this even if I wasn’t married to him.
But to survive the early part of 2009, we sold some of our most expensive jewelry — including Lou’s Patek Philippe wristwatch, my gorgeous white Chanel watch that I got in Dubai, and, my six-carat diamond earrings — just to keep our heads above the waterline while Lou looked for specific ways to make some income. And of course, we finally had to let our leased cars “go back,” as Lou would say.
The repo man showed up with a flatbed – not a tow truck; and, he didn’t aggressively take me down with a lug wrench like a criminal in my driveway like I thought he would. He also didn’t verbally accuse me of being a loser who couldn’t make her car payments. In fact, the whole experience was anticlimactic in every way. He was this very nice man with a thankless job where people went out of their way to hide from him. (That must be awful, right?)
But I remember apologizing to him for being so hard to find. He smiled at me and said, “Good luck, lady. You seem like a nice person.”
At least the repo guy still believed in me!
But without either of our cars, Lou and I relied on our cherry red Vespa scooter to get us wherever we needed to go. Oh my gosh, we rode that thing EVERYWHERE! People would report sightings of us racing home in the pouring down rain, as well as Lou zipping through town on his way to the gym every morning — WITHOUT A HELMET. (Just so you know, Lou is not really a safety equipment kind of guy…)
I rocked my Schwinn beach cruiser pretty hard (and because my last name is also Zant, I did all of my cruising without a helmet, too — although it was a heat issue for me, not an anti-safety stance.) But I was so tan from riding my bike and walking everywhere in the blazing Florida sun. We were very lucky to have moved off of Siesta Key prior to losing everything. We were living in downtown Sarasota at the time, and it was pretty easy to get anywhere I wanted to go by foot or bike. I came up with all kinds of great (and safe — because I’m still me) biking routes to get me exactly where I needed to be right on time. (Albeit, even without a helmet, I was still very sweaty when I arrived.)
Lou and I also did whatever we could to keep our chins up; and, we tried to keep our self-talk about the situation positive.
At first, I felt entitled to my bitterness, but eventually, my own thoughts felt toxic in my brain. Something that I’ve learned is that in order to get passed this horrible thing that happened, I had to forgive. And it’s not easy to do… In fact, it’s one of the most difficult things I’ve ever decided to do. But please believe me when I tell you that for me, it was a requirement.
Just to be clear: What I mean is that I had to figure out a way to forgive the people who literally stole all of our money — even though they never asked me to.
It was my only way to move past the horrible feelings that started to consume me after our reality started to really set in. I had to decide to free those people from the weight of my fear-fueled anger and wrath because it was killing me. As it turned out, this kind of forgiveness was a form of self-preservation for me, even though it was brutally tough to do.
But forgiving myself was way harder.
In the very early days, I spent a lot of time judging myself for every decision and every dollar I ever wasted. I had this horrible narrative running in my head that I “deserved” to be in this boat because I wasn’t trustworthy and I was a selfish person. I still get sucked up by versions of self-judgment even now — which I’ll admit makes writing about my life worrisome on many levels. I did, however, finally find freedom in my heart when I accepted that I’m human, and God isn’t running a huge conspiracy to take me down. Life is twisty, and living with a huge risk taker like Lou has set me up for some thrilling highs, and some pretty gutting lows. But I can honestly tell you this: The adventure is worth it…
Even back then, I knew that.
After seven years of marriage to Lou, I had to acknowledge that my vanilla personality started to take on ribbons of chocolate and caramel swirls that made it impossible for me to be completely satisfied with “safe.” While I did want to find some level of financial stability, there was clearly a part of me that didn’t want to settle for boring or predictable. And even though I was still pretty scared about how we’d survive, Lou had somehow converted me into was closet thrill-seeker! I had a taste of the wild ride Lou provided, and even though I mostly hated it… I kind of loved it, too!
So I did what I could to find some version of “safety”: I cleaned things. Really, really well.
I used to say to people that if a crime scene investigator came to my home, he’d never find any forensic evidence that Lou or I lived in our condo. My place was the very definition of spotless. I would get down on my hands and knees — Cinderella style — and scrub the baseboards, and every condiment in my refrigerator was perfectly void of grimy fingerprints or sticky caps. Plus, I swept and vacuumed our tile floors daily to make sure there were no long blonde strands of my hair — anywhere.
During this first phase of my new reality, I felt the happiest when I was on the floor of the shower with a toothbrush and some baking soda, getting the “gunk” out of the grout. I could get a full on high from a clean bathtub or spotless stainless steel stovetop. Maybe it was the cheap cleaning products I was using. But I don’t think so. And don’t get me started on my laundry and my ironing! All of Lou’s shirts looked like they enlisted in the Army and were reporting for duty, and they always had the fresh scent of Tide Original wafting through them. (I never skimped on detergent. Never.)
Thankfully, Lou was very tolerant of my neurosis.
But whatever it took to stay up, we tried it — including playing clever games with the little bit of money we did scrape together to run our lives. Sometimes on a Friday night, Lou would tell me we had exactly $20 to spend for the whole weekend. We’d need to consider gas for the scooter in our decisions, and, we’d need to make sure that amount of money could take us the distance for the whole weekend. Living in a pricey city like Sarasota made that more of a challenge than you might think, but we were always up to the task.
NOTE: Looking back, I realize that this was the first time in a long while that I had measured the actual value of a $20 bill.
When it came to making frugal weekend plans, we’d start by looking for free things to do that we could either bike to, or scooter to. I remember the night Lou and I ate nachos at home, and then rode our bikes to a free Christian heavy metal concert at a high school near our condo. (Yep. You read that right. Think Metallica, only the singers are demonically screaming about Jesus.)
It wasn’t a great concert. But Lou and I laughed so much! I remember this one home school kid — he was maybe 14 — who was rocking a pair of homemade ripped jeans, and a scissor slashed T-shirt. The T-shirt was thoroughly torn and frayed, but you could still make out the All Dogs Go to Heaven decal on the front. He completed his thrasher look with mismatched Chuck Taylor All Stars, and a spiked hair-do. He was really into the music — head banging and all.
Lou and I watched when the kid took a break from dancing, and made his way over to a tight cluster of moms standing on the edge of the football field. They were all dressed in tank tops, skorts, and sensible sandals. They were plugging their ears, and had miserable expressions on their faces. They also had multiple coolers and insulated lunch bags by their feet. When the kid approached his mom, she quickly unzipped her cooler and handed her little faith-filled metal head a bottle of water — and what looked like a homemade raisin-oat bar — before she covered up her ears again.
With his water and wholesome treat in hand, Lou and I watched as the kid went back to thrashing for Jesus. In a way, it was pretty adorable. (If the music hadn’t been so awful.)
But Lou was so cool to hang out with, and he always came up with something quirky or fun to do “on the cheap.” Even though this was a super stressful time in our lives, Lou managed to create a way for us to keep having nice and normal experiences. Back then, I still looked pretty young, so if we ended up with just enough money to go to a movie, Lou would attempt to buy our tickets by taking a very big risk.
He’d say, “One senior and one student please.”
The ticket worker would almost always look at Lou, then at me… I never had to say it, but I was always ready to call Lou “dad” if I had to… Needless to say, I was always so relieved when the worker would just slide the tickets through the little hole in the window. Whew! It was kind of thrilling every time it worked out — even though I fully realize it was wrong. (Sorry Regal Cinemas…)
But in addition to my naughty and creative husband, I also had this network of beautiful girlfriends who invited me to do things all the time. My friend Leslie worked for the Ritz Carlton, and she included me in all kinds of fancy events. She always made me feel like it was “no big deal” to add me to her table at a luncheon or to pick up my tab at brunch, and I suppose that’s why I always accepted her invitations.
But most of the time it felt awful when people would do super generous or nice things for me because I didn’t believe I deserved to those kinds of things anymore. I felt like such a mooch, and so I did find myself hiding from my friends from time to time. There were some very lonely days during that time where I became like a freaky, tan little hermit.
