Changemakers Confidential: Molly

Real stories. Real people. Real change.

Molly and I go back.

We’re the kind of friends whose paths crossed in college, have numerous friends in common, and who, as adults, see each other once a year at our annual Friends’ Thanksgiving gathering, where we all get caught up on the year, drink too much, and then get teary-eyed and emotional when we’re sharing what we’re grateful for because that’s how Midwesterners do feelings.

Did I mention that during these blessed occasions Molly is the most colorful, engaging, and thoroughly irreverent storyteller of us all? It’s all or nothing with her (meaning we hear ALL the details about ALL the things) and we love her for it. Her willingness to be brutally open and honest about all aspects of her life, with nothing hidden or off limits, is as refreshing as it is astonishing to me. What a relief to encounter a living, breathing, unscripted, messy, get-back-up-again, vibrant human being, who is unvarnished, sans any veneer. It makes me think about how hard so many of us (myself included) work to keep those dark, murky, unpalatable parts of ourselves locked up tight so no one seems them but us, if we even acknowledge them at all, and what kind of healing, growth, and letting go would be possible if we gave ourselves permission to say “fuck it” more and revealed what’s behind the curtain.

Molly’s update is going to be a two-parter, because after we got over the fact that we were connecting outside of Friends’ Thanksgiving (and may meet up for dinner/drinks! madness!), we dove so deep into change as only people who have time and history can do, that I couldn’t limit our conversation to one update because it wouldn’t do justice to the learning, growth, and sheer grittiness she’s had to live through in her change story.

So this is Part 1 of 2, where we focus on the love of her life, how the timing and circumstances never seemed to line up for them, and how his early death drove so many things home for her that she has somehow, impossibly, become the grown-up in the room, amidst multiple divorces, coming to terms with her bi-polar manic disorder, and…roller derby (don’t she look badass in her pic?). So without further adieu, I give you Madame Molly and her change story.

So Molly, what is the change you want to talk about today? As I thought about what I wanted to talk about today, I realized that I had to talk first about Scott’s death. There is nothing in my life that doesn’t connect back to that event, and definitely in how I manage change. If I look back over the entirety of our relationship, he’s been the one person who has consistently helped me manage change since I was 19.

How did the two of you meet? His sister, Erin, and I have known each other since we were 12, and are still friends to this day. He was two years older than us…her super-hot older brother. The two of them grew up in an extremely abusive household. By the time we were all old enough to drive and get ourselves out of the house, he’d already made the decision to leave his home because he was not physically safe there.

I went to this party when I was 19, and home from school for the summer. Scott and I met there, and it was like a scene out of a movie…everyone has those movie moments in life. I remember sitting there, chatting with two older boys that I’d drooled over for years, because now that I was back from college, I was feeling so grown up and pretty for the first time in my life and so not nerdy anymore! So I’m sitting between these two guys, we’re chatting, there’s a bonfire going in front of us, and I look up and see Scott.

He was the definition of a wallflower, and he’s on the opposite site of the space, literally standing up against a wall of a garage, and he’s watching me, from across the way. I remember briefly making eye contact with him, knowing that he was watching me as I smiled, laughed, flirted. Did you feel any type of charge? For sure. I felt like he was the person I should be talking to, instead of these two other guys. But I didn’t know how to make that happen then…I was too young, too stupid…didn’t get it. So that night, we said hey, and that was it. 

That fall, I went back to school and was stalked and sexually assaulted. I finished the first block and came home. Erin came home from Bryn Mawr early that semester, and invited me to go and see our friend, Sam, in a play in Duluth. She told me that her brother wanted to come with, and I was like, cool, not remembering meeting Scott at all. He drove Erin and I up to Duluth for the play, and unfortunately, his first experience in talking with me was in hearing me tell Erin all about what had happened to me at school. After the play, we went back to Sam’s place, and Scott and I had one of those spontaneous, all-night conversations. We just talked, no kissing, no sex…we wrestled a bit because we had to touch each other somehow, but it was purely plutonic at the time.

After that night, I remember saying to myself, I don’t know if I’m ever going to see this guy again. And…I’m not OK with that. So, I “left” my mittens at his house when we got back from Duluth so I could come back and “find them” and maybe have another chance to talk to him again. So, I go out to his house the next day, assuming he was there and that I would see him (I knew that Erin had already left for college). I met his mom at the door, and said something like, “Hey, I was hoping to say good-bye to Scott before I headed back to college, is he around?” and his mom told me that he was watching the Vikings’ game at a friend’s house. She ended up calling him to tell him I was there, and he said he’d be there as soon as he could. It took him two fucking hours! So, I stayed and played cards with his mom and his uncle, Earl, until he showed up. We ended up spending twelve hours together that day…the whole evening. When I went back to school, he started writing me letters, and eventually, we got to the making out stage. :)

You know…as I reflect on this, I see how I wasn’t raised to think very highly of myself, to go for it, to claim things that were important or meaningful to me. I’m 46 years old today, and this is the first time in my life that I feel like I can fully claim those things for myself. Back then, I always knew that Scott cared about me, but it never occurred to me that he loved me like I loved him. I think it was some kind of survival mechanism, like Game of Thrones when Arya is trying to save her dire wolf…she throws rocks at the wolf to keep it on its toes, to pay attention…it was like that with Scott and I. That rock-throwing was a way we kept each other in our lives, in spite of the timing/circumstances that never lined up.

After his ski accident, he was in a vegetative state, and we all knew the end was near. The ski patrol woman who found him stayed with him for 24 hours until they could find his people. I was one of the first ones there. She let his older brother and I stay in her mother-in-law apartment for the week as we were figuring things out. During this time, his best friend called me at four in the morning, and said, you need to know how Scott felt about you. You don’t know what he did for you behind the scenes. He’d always wanted to marry you, but he was afraid he couldn’t be a good husband/father from all of the abuse he’d endured as a kid. I found out that he came home a week early from Japan so he could see my last roller derby bout. That he’d been in Alaska working on the pipeline, but told me he was in North Dakota, so he could come and help me with my first divorce so I didn’t think it was too far for him to come, not too great of an inconvenience.

There were times it got almost sick, he wanted to care for me so much, like when my bi-polar disorder was rampant, and I was cycling, crazy and suicidal, and he was always there for me. When you’re suffering from mania, you can have chunks in your life that are worse than others, and when I would come out of those times, I wanted him so badly in my life, but I wasn’t doing the things that could stop the drama because I knew he would come running if I was in crisis. We didn’t know how to not to come together in times that weren’t filled with crisis/drama. I was so wrecked when he was in the hospital, knowing that his end was near…at one point, I was screaming at his lifeless body about the injustice of it all, and as I took a breath in my rantings, I heard his brother say quietly behind me, we didn’t know how, Molly. We never learned how, we had no one to teach us. That absolutely destroyed me. And I knew it was 100% true.

In order to stop those cycles of chaos in my life, I had to make decisions that I knew would lead to him not being around as much. It allowed him to not feel obligated to stay close to me to protect me, so he could have space to figure things out/live his life, and also gave me space to dig deeper into things I’d been in denial about or flat-out ignoring so I could start the healing process for myself. A number of years ago, I miscarried Scott’s baby (so we did end up sleeping together), and it was really hard for both of us. I don’t think he ever fully recovered from that loss. I know I still think about it. I remember this one time, I was holding the infant of some our friends who’d newly adopted/become parents, and I looked over and Scott was weeping. He said to me, I should’ve married you when I had the chance. I’m so sorry. And he got up and walked away. That was the closest we ever came to acknowledging what we had.

When they were cleaning out his things after he died, I asked his mom, totally joking around because I assumed he didn’t have it anymore, “You know, if you find my Concordia College sweatshirt that I borrowed him years ago, I’d really like that fucker back.” She responded, “Is this the one?” and held up my old, ratty sweatshirt. She said, he wore that when he missed you. For nineteen years. It’s all so much like a country song, it’s really fucking sad…you realize how dumb you are when you’re young and how you say so much about some things that don’t really matter, and often say very little about the things that do.

In time, I got a good grief therapist, and one of the things she talked about was how I now had to reconstruct my history through a new lens, this new lens of the loss of one of the most, if not the most, important person in my life. How I’d just found out all of these beautiful things about Scott, and now had to find a way to incorporate this into my story. I’m still working on that. I had something I didn’t realize I had. That’s the funny thing about grief…once you get going, you see all the other things you didn’t grieve line up very patiently in queue, waiting their turn, and it’s all so overwhelming and beautiful and sad and just fucking sucks. But the work is required, so we keep showing up, checking in with ourselves, eventually taking a few steps forward into this new present, informed now by a new history.

It sounds like when change happened, or there was a crisis that caused some kind of change, the two of you would come together. How did you reframe or change that dynamic of how you came together when there wasn’t the same level of crisis? How were you both able to show up differently? We were like…farmers. We come from farming families. There’s something constant about change as a farmer…it’s seasonal. There’s so much outside of your control: the weather, the viability of the seeds you plant, the planting conditions, what the actual harvest will be. You can prepare and have the right equipment, but there’s shit that still happens that you don’t have control over. Change can be similar; you can prepare all you want for it, but there is still the element of surprise, the unknown, that sudden storm that comes out of nowhere and absolutely slays you in a way you could never have foreseen, leaving you in a broken, sobbing pile of hell who has to figure out how to deal with the bullshit aftermath.

When I made the decision to start changing certain aspects of my life that had controlling my life for years and that were not in my best interest, like my alcohol consumption, the amount of sleep I was (wasn’t) getting, or attending a grad school where ego was such a large part of the process (which is problematic/complex for someone with mania/bi-polar disorder), I had to make some hard choices so I could “buy” the right equipment, buy the right seeds and set myself up to be a better farmer of me. During this time, it sounds like you were resourcing yourself so that if another episode came, you could stand on this new, stronger ground. I would imagine it was good for Scott to see that, even if felt strange for him, because it created space that was healthy - and probably awkward - and that allowed a deep reset of the two of you, how you were. Yes. It was really hard for him. He didn’t have the skills to change well. He couldn’t let himself go there. Not that you don’t feel things, don’t want things…it was some kind of limit he couldn’t go past, I’m assuming given his abusive past and how that stayed with him on some level throughout his life.

You’ve mentioned divorce in our conversation, and I know there have been two in your life. How do you think the connection you had with Scott impacted your relationships? My ex-husband knew that there wasn’t anything he could do about it, that my friendship with Scott was always going to be super important to me, so he did that “I’ll be friendly but I fucking hate your guts” thing. There were times when I’d tell him that Erin, Scott, and I were going out for drinks, and ask him if he’d like to join us, and he was always like, NO. My ex-wife knew about him, but never met him. After Scott died, she and I ran into a good friend of mine at an Ani DiFranco concert at First Ave, who ended up asking about how things were going since Scott’s death. I was like an open wound at that point (it was about a month after), so I totally started sobbing as I told her, when my ex walks up to us. She asked me what was wrong, and I told her that I’m talking about Scott’s death, and she disappeared. I figured she went to join some of the other friends we went to the concert with, but she ended up getting rip-roaring drunk and falling down outside the entrance, so the evening ended up going a different way than originally planned. You know, I think that one of the reasons I married her was because on paper, she had all of these qualities that Scott wanted for me. She was socially energetic, had a fun life in the city…it felt like an endorsement from him almost. If I can’t be with you, she seems like a real swell gal. Honestly, if he would’ve have lived, though, I don’t think I would’ve married her. I would’ve always been waiting to marry him, to be with him. There’s that damn country song again.

Talk to me about the role of choice in change. You’ve had so many different types of choices to make in your life over the years when change has come, I would love to hear your thoughts on that. When change comes, you’ve always got the possibility of listening to either your angels or your devils. We always have a choice in how hard we make it or let it be. We all have decision points along the way: how/where can I act with integrity and dignity, even when things get rough as fuck? A question I often ask myself in these instances is, would I be ashamed to tell my nieces and nephews about my decisions? About how I showed up in change? Am I OK with what I said or didn’t say? I’m always OK if I turn out to be wrong about something, but I don’t want to be ashamed of myself, or ashamed to tell them (age-appropriately, bien sur) about what happened. It’s a promise I made to myself when I started to manage my bi-polar disorder and get clear on what health meant to me and what I needed to do in order to create/maintain it.

The compass tattoo on my arm are the initials of my four living nieces and nephews as a reminder to me to whom I’m accountable in this life. It reminds me to tap into this internal knowing I have that may or may not be fully understood, and to call upon this integrity and dignity I possess in those moments that guide my actions.

She pauses for a bit, and start laughing…you know…when the hell did I become the wise elder? How did I become the grown-up in the room? How did I become someone who tries to have all of her decisions lead back to dignity/integrity? That’s totally fucked up! Change can do strange things to a person, that’s for sure…

Part 2 of Molly’s change story is coming to you next week, where we’ll talk about earning your spot on a team, how community shows up in times of crisis and change, and cultivating the practice of continuous internal inquiry, especially when you have to dance with the darker parts of yourself to heal, learn, and move forward. It’s gonna be great and I hope you all come back for it next week - and: I’d love it if you’d share this post with others you think would enjoy reading Molly’s story/and any of the other stories we’ve shared to-date in our growing Changemakers community.

Thanks, everyone, for reading and for your support in making these change stories a reality! Leave your thoughts/comments below, if you’ve got ‘em, and we’ll see you next week for more Molly!

Your change maven extraordinaire,

Kristina