As the early months bustled along, it was only to be expected that a few of Cinderella's proverbial other slippers might drop and one by one they did. These revelations gave an answer to the baffling question as to why her trove of exceptional endowments had yet to flourish and convey her beyond the confines of a dinky town. They also spoke to the reverberating statement, "....somebody like me" heard on the evening of our genesis.

The first slipper hit the floor pretty hard. As a young girl, she had fallen victim to pedophilia. Fred and Marcia who lived two streets over were Mom and Dad's best pals and so when her parents went away she was often entrusted to the care of their great friends. Unknown to her parents, godfather Fred used those absences to groom and molest the petite miss left in his keeping.

come here little darling let's brush back your hair

goodness what is it that makes you so sweet

has me act like a bee to the nectar I swear

you know, that box full of candy you can't help but eat

maybe some tickles will show me exactly what's where

by your sides, at your belly, on the bottoms of your feet

none of those, then I think it must be hiding down there

I'll have to dig around for a while under your seat

pull off those panties, get your bottom all bare

and feel in both ends so the search is complete

now that you let me you should be ashamed

no good girl would tease me to do all them things

sure as shootin' it's you who'll be blamed

they'll say you're one of those angels without any wings

your parents won't love you, might even send you away

don't forget too I'm your Dad's boss down at the mill

he has to listen to me and do whatever I say

I can fire him from his job and I promise I will

don't worry though I won't tell a soul about our little play

secrets are safe when the tongue is kept still

You might well imagine how hard it was for Mom when her little girl one day disclosed that Uncle Fred was in fact a perp. Fred and Marcia had been such close and trusted friends, making the enormity of the shock just too unbelievable. More than that, Mom didn't reallywant to accept it as possible for her to have failed to protect her daughter. Mom's initial stupor, unfortunately, left her psychologically injured daughter feeling not only doubted but also at fault for maybe having done something wrong without even knowing what it was that she did. This led to a huge and confused sense of guilt and even regret for having disclosed the foul matter at all. Worse, these malignancies were magnified several times over by the explosive violence and chaos that erupted when Dad was apprised. Needless to say, Mom, Dad and the victim were each branded with traumas that festered within and negatively impacted their family dynamics for years to come.

Next up, we arrive at the adolescent age of fourteen. Being a lowly high school ninth grader, she thought it especially "cool" that several junior and senior boys were interested in her and allowed her to be included in their social circle. The circumstance afforded her an unusual status, making her the envy of her girlfriends and granting her access to the automobiles and alcohol-fueled parties of the older crowd.

One afternoon while walking the roadside home, three of the older boys with whom she had partied pulled up in a shiny new Chevy Super Sport. They invited her to go cruising. Flattered, she accepted. Once in the car, she was immediately handed a bottle of beer and the tour began. After a while, it was observed that riding around with open bottles of beer was of course risky, so it was decided they'd drive to a relatively secluded spot along the railroad tracks that traversed the outskirts of town. There the car was parked and for no particular reason, the quartet began aimlessly walking the tracks with one remaining six-pack in hand. No doubt you've already guessed, it was in the woods just off the tracks where she was raped by all three of the boys. When recounting the event she tearfully heaved, "I stupidly thought they were my friends." As is common among rape victims, she did not divulge the rape to anyone and only first told her mother years later.

Already bearing several severe scars in her still very early life, she naturally found it troubling to continue attending the high school where she couldn't help but continually encounter the boys who had violated her. None of them were able to look her in the eye and avoided her as much as she did them. Still that didn't offer much solace. Floundering academically and at frequent odds with her parents, each being tormented by their individual wounds of heart and mind, she dropped out of school at the very tender age of sixteen, left home and incredibly set out to make her own way. Even with all of her gifts, it was a rough go and before very long she was gradually sinking, a waif amidst forces. She was sheltered only by the good graces of her girlfriend's parents who allowed her to alternately hop from home to home. During this period she found a job at a pizza joint. It was there that she entered into a relationship which proved to be a grievous error.

At twenty-three Travis Penderson was a budding con man eminently on a path to nowhere. With the greatest of ease, he could fabricate intricate illusions and weave elaborate webs of lies out of the slick silk that slithered freely from his mouth. So consumed by the carbonated schemes he had bubbling in his head, he even convinced himself he would one day birth a surefire plot leading to fame and riches. While deludedly developing this grand plan, Travis in reality survived by smuggling and distributing illicit drugs. He surrounded himself with a squad of wannabe bikies who functioned as mules for authentic hard-core Canadian motorcycle gangs. Travis and his rag-tag cohorts shouldered all of the border crossing perils for chump change while the gangs up north kept the lion's share of the profits. The crew typified what Randy Newman's Fat Man would peg as little criminals.

Despite his defects, Travis recognized that the pretty, vivacious girl who took his pizza orders had the uncommon intelligence, talents, and moxie to be going somewhere he never could and figured he might be able to turn that to his advantage. He was also able to sense the vulnerability of her innocence, her dire predicament and her desperation to break out. Consequently, he pounced at the chance to seize the dangling dolly for his very own. She of course knew he was way full of it, but he did have the mystique of an outlaw, had money, soothing drugs and the kind of lies that she needed to hear. Filtered through the eyes of a pressure-cooking sixteen-year-old with meager means and fewer prospects, she regrettably regarded Harley hog riding Travis as a hand of rescue she had little option other than to accept. Thus ensued an oddly symbiotic, more often parasitic, on-and-off textbook relationship of domination, soul-sucking manipulation, psychological abuse and domestic violence that spanned more than four years.

During the year prior to my strolling onto the stage, she had to her astounding and individual credit almost completely cleansed herself of Travis Penderson. She renegotiated the apartment lease shared with Travis into her name alone and pro se obtained a restraining order against him. With those, she cast Travis out, for the most part ridding herself of the leech save his lame and eventually dwindling attempts to ingratiate himself. Over the previous summer, she had also finished an entire high school equivalency program, begun her part-time modeling and secured a full-time position with the human service agency where we met. Shortly after we started canoodling I moved in with her. My place was more than a half-hour ride away while hers was only a few minutes from the community residence we managed. It was a logistical, financial and personal consolidation that benefited both of us.

Of course, our cohabitation resulted in my coming to know her with greater and greater intimacy. About six months in, the last of the sagging slippers spiraled into what had been up until then a fairly well-camouflaged rabbit hole. Being in the business of applied psychology I should've detected the signs sooner. Thing is, I was thoroughly beguiled by romance and the abundant arsenal of expert compensations she had honed over time.

The first red flag went for the most part undetected. Retrospectively it was during the second of our honeymoon months when her customarily cheerful disposition began losing a little luster. Over the course of a few weeks, her usually enthusiastic temperament eroded into a bit of "whatever" which over several more days degenerated into testiness. At work, this transformation was imperceptible, but at home, it showed. We had disagreements, arguments and our first-all out shouting match. At the time, I chalked it up to the adjustments couples need to make when discovering the shiny new object of their affection might not exactly be the dream person that was initially anticipated. A few days further on she missed popping up early to start breakfast. Then came the morning when she complained of debilitating fatigue and took to bed for the next day and a half. This was very much out of character, but she soon recovered, bouncing back to her genial self. All once again well with the universe, it was easy to simply blame the recent irritability on menstrual symptoms.

The second code red flashed another couple of months on. In similar fashion, there were a few weeks of increasing conflict between us. The arguments were worse this round since my budding sense of insecurity was forecasting an inevitable demise to our relationship. Reckoning that the college classes she had begun would soon be broadening her horizons, I figured my days were numbered. The Green Monster was gnawing on my bones and inflaming my formative fears of abandonment. I worried too that our eight-year age disparity would not survive her impending blossom. Her petulance and my colliding apprehensions brought about a few figurative knock-down-drag-outs. As had been the case previously, the tensions ultimately crumbled into a couple of days of bed rest. This time though, Little Miss Sunshine's narcolepsy exhibited an unsettling resemblance to catatonia and gave me pause for a long hmmmm. As before though, she quickly rebounded and happy days were back again. I probably should've assigned greater importance to my uncomfortable observation. In defense, I can only claim that the chubby archer was still very active and had to be dipping his arrowheads into some sort of blinding concoction.

Having witnessed two contentious periods followed by twenty-four to forty-eight hours of sleep bordering on the cadaverous, it finally dawned on me that the arrival of our third round of rifts was likely pointing to issues more significant than merely troublesome menstrual symptoms. Her down days were just too extreme. She didn't complain of severe cramping or any other customary miseries, and despite our domestic upheavals, she never exhibited other than exemplary behavior at work. Aside from her acute episodes, recoveries from her bleak bouts were relatively brisk and her general physical health was the superior sort enjoyed by most young adults. Menstruation being cyclical clued me to begin thinking in terms of cyclical disorders. She functioned far too well for what was then referred to as manic depression. However, while poking around that subject I came across a couple of abstracts that introduced me to manic depression's little sister, cyclothymia.

I learned that cyclothymia, or more euphemistically bipolar lite, is a somewhat rarer and less conspicuous chemical disorder. Nonetheless, the condition is formidable and can be difficult to diagnose and manage. It's characterized by fixed-period mood swings of varying degrees that differ in intensity from person to person. Of course, everyone experiences mood changes, but when one's affect tracks a pattern rather than normative responses to ordinary conditions, that is to say when the frame doesn't simply provide a boundary for the artwork but instead either influences, obscures or even dictates the content, the result is problematic. The high side or manic phase of cyclothymia, akin to bipolar disorder, often features pronounced exuberance, impulsiveness, overconfidence, overachievement, insomnia and hypersexuality. The lower end or depressive phase includes irritability, despair, suicidal ideation, lethargy and hypersomnia. With the notion of cyclothymia on the table the pieces of the puzzle began to almost magnetically snap into place. It accounted for her impeccable work performance, the juggling of multiple projects, the adroit social skills, the all-night baking and cooking sessions, the three a.m. fish tank cleanings, and yes, the super-sized sex too. It also figured into her occasional bursts of temper, lacerating slights, distraction, expressions of despair and what I would sometimes refer to as hibernation. The only component left to establish was the duration of the orbit. After a bit of calendar study, the periodicity emerged. It was a sixty-day rotation. The interval initially proved tricky to tease out because it was on an unintuitive, every-other-month sequence confoundingly masked by her closely coinciding menstruation.

The subtle subterranean rhythm of her affliction ran as an obscured undercurrent. She had no practical awareness of her slowly pirouetting chemical warp, no notion of being sealed inside a seesawing jar of molasses, perpetually migrating from a ventral striatum's elation on one end to an anterior insula despondency at the other. Her world was a water globe menagerie of joy and sorrow, a mosaic of light and shadow rolling across the calendar. Though caught between a breathless present and a monotonous past, the oscillating pattern always escaped her. Intertwined with her menstruation, she experienced the sway as a seamless tapestry of the existential ordinary. Her highs were considered surges of ambition and lows nothing more than the usual consequences of day-in-day-out pressures, punctuated now and then by hormonal collapses. Alike the old adage, she was prevented from seeing the forest for the trees. I, on the other hand, had the advantage of an outsider's unobstructed perspective. My unique circumstance, being almost continuously in her presence, afforded me an aerial drone's overview from which to observe her behavior not only in the present but the recent past and predictable future as well. The momentum of her congeniality and diamond-hard dedication to work kept her downward spirals well concealed from clients, co-workers and other casual contacts. She simply refused, via sheer will, to allow the quicksands or her psyche to interfere. It was only when she reached home that she would relent to the exhaustion of resisting her melancholy, give in to its intermittent course and sooner or later be consumed for a day or two.

Once I had convinced myself my suspicions were legitimate, I felt a begrudging responsibility to bring my discovery to her attention and offer what help I could with assessment and management. I use the word begrudging because her disorder served to augment a host of uniquely wonderful and highly desirable qualities. It magnified her intelligence and aural charisma, made her one in a million and ignited the unique spark that caused nearly everyone around her to feel suddenly elevated into the ranks of a special club they hadn't until just then realized they were members. She was vibrant, fun, talented, entertaining. I didn't want any of that to be dulled or diluted, and selfishly, certainly not for the industrial strength sex to be diminished even one iota. On the other hand, the middle-school rows, the instances of self-loathing, and the worrisome installments of virtual paralysis, though relatively brief, were no fun for me and immeasurably worse for her. I hated to see her suffer.

Despite making certain she was on an upswing when I first broached the idea of cyclothymia, it still didn't go over well. Having it suggested to anyone that they might not be in complete control is a frightening and, on some levels, insulting proposal.

"Oh, I get it, you're telling me I'm a lunatic and should have my head examined because you think I'm so phenomenal and you love me so much!" Stomp, stomp, stomp and slammo goes the door.

Needless to say, for a while it was the source and subject of intense argument, to put it mildly. Only after I had her agree to a demonstration I devised did she begin to entertain the possibility that a cyclothymic specter might be afoot. Without disclosing the content, I wrote down several predictions about her future disposition and anticipated behavior, sealed them in an envelope and had her date it. When my predictions were later opened and proved to be accurate, she assented to confer with a mutually trusted colleague of ours who was also a psychiatrist. Thereafter an extensive exam was pursued followed by medication trials. Before long an efficacious pharmaceutical was found and an optimal treatment dose was established. Much to my surprise and great relief, the medication worked to alleviate most of her symptoms and only marginally muffled her many sensational attributes. Hallelujah!

https://youtu.be/MxYsi5Y-xOQ