"Love Warrior": A Memoir of Rock Bottom, Redemption, Infidelities and Finding Your Spirit

Meet Basil, our new "office pug." He didn't quite understand the concept of sitting with a book, but he'll get the hang of it.  

"So even if the hot loneliness is there, and for 1.6 seconds we sit with that restlessness when yesterday we couldn't sit for even one, that's the journey of the warrior." - Pema Chodron "When Things Fall Apart"

Avid readers of Glennon Doyle Melton's blog "Momastary" already know the ending to the story of Glennon and her husband Craig's marriage.  In Melton's latest book "Love Warrior: A Memoir" (selected as Oprah's most recent Book Club pick), she delves into her painful past to make sense of the devastation of her marriage.

I don't want to spoil too much about this book because it's worth a read.  Melton has legions of devoted fans that may have gotten hooked on her truth waterfalls from her popular blog or from her other New York Times Bestselling book "Carry On, Warrior." Melton has a way of connecting with her readers.  She's an Amy Schumer Trainwreck meets Brene Brown's power of vulnerability meets Gloria Steinham.  She's not afraid to write the whole ugly truth and she's not afraid to own her story of pain and renewal.  She's a highly sought after speaker, and her TedTalk is one of my favorite of all time.  I like that she is real and unfiltered.  That she writes like a friend telling another friend about her pain and occasionally her joy.

Unlike the collection of essays about parenting in "Carry On, Warrior" that had a charming, playful parenting bent, "Love Warrior" is serious business starting with Melton's slide into bulimia and alcoholism.  As a young girl, she finds bulimia in attempt to keep herself small and beautiful.  Even after a stint in a mental hospital, she never shakes the habit of binging and purging.  In high school and college she turns to alcohol to numb herself from intimate relationships.  It's easier to be numb than to feel deeply.

When she meets Craig with his dashing smile and his charm and good looks, she can't believe he is truly interested in her.  Their relationship is anything but simple.  After she gets pregnant and he takes her to an abortion clinic, she leaves her alone to recover while he goes out for the evening with his friends.  The second time she gets pregnant by him and she finds herself at rock bottom on the bathroom floor, she decides that she will have the baby with or without him and that she will turn her life around with or without him.

He decides to stay and marry her.  She decides that the can stay and that she will marry him.

That should be their happy ending, but when you have two people - one that only communicates and feels with his body (Craig) and one that only communicates and feels with her head (Glennon), there are bound to be issues, especially when both of them have addictions and secrets and sordid pasts, but only one of them has chosen to be real about them.

What follows after the discovery of Craig's secrets is a story of how love can pull us together and tear us apart.  How marriage can be lonely and hopeful all at the same time.  How you can marry someone and be with them for years, but never really know them and when you do get to know them how you may not want "for better or for worse" with the person you thought you married.  It's a story about finding yourself at rock bottom but finding a way back to who you were truly meant to be.

I loved so much of this book especially that Glennon has a way of writing that speaks to her reader's soul.  There were also parts of the book that felt a bit sermonized for me.  You need to be okay with all of her God and Spirit talk to fully appreciate her journey.  At times the dialogue is so stilted that it was painful.  I can only imagine that those real life conversations were just as hard between her and her husband as they tread the delicate path of finding true intimacy with each other after almost losing each other and the family unit that they built.

As she tries to heal from her brokenness Glennon finds yoga as a way to get present in her body again.  She finds God as a way to reconnect with her spirit.  She learns to breathe.  She learns that she is a warrior - a love warrior.

The first 75% of the book had me completely hooked, but at times the long sermonizing and repetition of the second half of the book felt like too much.  It's not that I think she is wallowing in her misery (because she's definitely had a hard go of it and she has so much to teach the rest of us), but I wish there could be some joy from time to time.  Yes, the story is one of hope and overcoming incredible sadness to try to reconnect with yourself and your marriage, and so that entails a bunch of questioning without a bunch of answering.  I get it.

If you are like me, by the end of this book, you are rooting for both sides of the marriage - Glennon and Craig.  You hope for them individually and hope for them together. Avid readers of Glennon's  blog, "Momastary" already know what becomes of their marriage, but I'll save that for you to find out.

'Carry On, Warrior - Thoughts on Life Unarmed': The best girlfriend you will ever have

Sometimes in life we find exactly what we need, exactly when we need it.  That's what happened to me when I found 'Carry On, Warrior: Thoughts on Life Unarmed' by Glennon Doyle Melton. I've never read Glennon's wildly popular blog Momastery.com.  Instead, I first encountered Glennon's ideas while searching for TEDTalks about Mental Health and Mental Illness for Stageoflife.com's latest writing contest.  In Glennon's TEDTalk called "Lessons from the Mental Hospital" she shares her truth about how she learned to feel her feelings and then share those thoughts with others when she had a mental breakdown and spent time in a mental hospital.  She explained that she sees her feelings as the guides in our lives and said, "I honor my feelings as my own personal prophets . . . I've learned to be still and receive the gifts." Although her voice quivered while she spoke from nerves and emotional energy, her ideas worth spreading resonated with me.  Oddly, the day before I happened upon Glennon's TEDTalk, I just picked up her book from the library - I liked the title and the bright lettering on the cover (whatever, I know you pick books by the covers and titles, too).  Serendipitous perhaps? I'm not sure.

I do know that since I cracked open Glennon's book which is a collection of her most loved blog posts from Momastery.com and other material not previously printed, I have already recommended Glennon's book to three of my friends.  Before I get into what I took away from the book there are a few things about Glennon you need to know:
1) She had a pretty messed up life before she got pregnant with her first child.  Drugs, alcohol, bulimia, self-loathing, depression . . . she is very upfront about this fact, and explains how those low moments shaped her.
2) She talks a bunch about the role of religion in her life and the presence of God.  For some, this might be a complete turn off or make them squeamish. For others, it might make them like her even more, but just be aware that God talk is VERY present in this book.
3) Glennon makes no excuses for the person she used to be or the person she is now.  She is flawed (for example she doesn't know how to cook - she doesn't even own pans NOR does she clean.  Her vacuum seems like an alien to her, but she taught her daughter to use it as a baby carriage, so her daughter now vacuums the house).

Because I didn't know anything about Glennon other than watching her TEDTalk, I approached her book with an open mind, and it was the first time in awhile that I laughed out loud while reading a book about parenting (right now I'm reading 'All Joy and No Fun' by Jennifer Senior and it is depressing the heck out of me).  When Glennon talked about her trips to Target and the officer telling her girls that they were disturbing the peace, I felt validated for those not so great mom days in grocery stores or retail store check out lines.  We've all been there, but when we see other people going through it, we generally turn the other way or feign superiority.  Why do we do that?

I also wrote things down in my journal about her deep connection with her children.  She doesn't really give advice, but her stories of her own life are so open and honest, that it helps.  One of my favorite chapters was "Don't Carpe Diem" where she explains the two types of time.  Chronos time is regular time. "It's ten excruciating minutes in the Target line time, four screaming minutes in time-out time, two hours until Daddy gets home time.  Chronos is the hard, slow-passing time we parents often live in." The other type of time is Kairos time which is "those magical moments in which time stands still." Like when you really see your children for the beautiful human beings that they are.  You actually see the length of their eyelashes or the curve of their cheeks.  It's the Kairos moments that Glennon tries to hold onto throughout the Chronos days of parenting and living.  "Carpe a couple of Kairoses a day. Good enough for me." I've been calling my awareness to those Kairos moments when Raina and Story hug each other and say, "I love you, baby" just because they felt like it, or how beautiful Story is when she sleeps.

She also offered this tidbit which I wrote down on its own page in my journal: The most important job as a parent is "to teach my children how to deal with being human." I guess I never thought of it like that before, but I am glad that Glennon wrote it, and glad that I'll remember it.  Being human isn't easy, so teaching my children how to deal with life is an important job.

Mostly Glennon's book reminded me to offer myself grace and kindness.  To forgive myself and know that life and parenting are permanent do overs.  If you screw up one moment, the next is a do over.  And that is okay just like not liking vacuuming or having a really bad afternoon with your children is not the end of the world.  My biggest take away lesson is to "embrace being human rather than fight against it." "Carry on, Warrior: Thoughts on Life Unarmed" was exactly what I needed to read at the exact right moment in my life because Glennon's truthful thoughts on her life helped me find truth in my own life.  To me, that's Chronos time well spent - reading a book that validates being messy and being human.