I was 22 the first time I got married.
Stubbornly convinced that love would make all those gigantic flashing red flags irrelevant, I eloped to Las Vegas. Despite him being almost 10 years my senior, he had no earthly idea what it meant to be a grownup, bless his heart.
We were not compatible in any way. We probably should have just dated a few months and parted ways. Instead, we got married.
Our relationship was an exact replica of one of the rules of multiplication:
Any number, multiplied by zero, becomes a zero.
We fought constantly. We separated and reunited on a somewhat predictable loop.
I don’t know what number I could have offered to represent what I was bringing to the table all those years ago. What I know now is that it wouldn’t have mattered if that number was 200 gazillion trillion; the zero would destroy it.
What’s a zero? The someone or something in your life that makes all that you have going for you completely irrelevant. A cocaine addiction is a zero. Having no self control is a zero. In my case, hitching your horse to the absolute wrong wagon is a big, fat, undeniable zero.
Willful blindness persisted. I still don’t know what exactly I was trying to prove. We kept getting back together. After a year, I was pregnant. It was a band-aid on a bullet wound. Babies are miracles, not magicians. They cannot void a zero.
Looking into my daughter’s eyes during those first few months, I knew my moment of truth had come. It was time to make the gut-wrenching decision to admit that we weren’t going to make it until ‘death do us part’. It was time to admit I failed.
The answer to a multiplication problem is called a product. If you don’t want a product of zero, then you cannot have any zeroes in your equation.
My daughter was depending on me to do not only the right thing for her, but the right thing for all of us. I had to finally trust that I could handle what would come next.
It was one of the best decisions I’d ever made.
Getting rid of a zero always is.
