189. Abby for the 1st Time On Divorce & Her Unrequited Love

Welcome back to We Can Do Hard Things.

If you have not listened to part one of this series about the

Mary Abigail Wombach, please go back and listen to the first episode.

We are interviewing my love, Amanda's sister-in-law, Abby Wombach.

The theme that we keep coming back to in Abby's life is love.

From birth till now, relentless pursuit of love in all the different forms that's come in her life so far.

We've talked about her mom, her love story with her mama, Judy, her love story with soccer, the soccer, the love story of her first marriage.

And now we're going to get into

one of my favorite topics, which is addiction and what it is.

And I think it can be a different thing for everybody.

What I've always thought of

when I think about you and your drinking

is that

you seem to, like a lot of people, use drinking as a way of not knowing.

something that in your bones you know.

For example, in the last episode, you talked a lot about knowing that something was missing in soccer because you got to the highest of the heights and it didn't, as you say, ease your angst.

You also had a knowing, and this is all at the same time in your life, that your marriage was not working.

But you could not let yourself know that because you

are not a quitter.

That's right.

Because you felt like you were carrying the entire queer future of marriage on your back and you couldn't let this marriage fail because everyone would be right, and it would be proof that gay marriage doesn't work because you loved your ex-wife,

and so you couldn't let yourself know that this was never going to work.

And so, you did what?

I drank.

You drank.

Tell us about drinking and what it was in your life

from the beginning.

So, oof,

I started drinking when I was young,

being the youngest of seven kids, being 12, 13, 14 years old, and brothers and sisters off in college, and they're doing the drinking thing.

And then they come home for breaks or summer and they're doing the drinking thing.

They're actively doing it.

I learned that that was what people did for fun, to like blow off steam.

And belonging, because that's what your big sisters and brothers are doing.

Yeah.

And I actually noticed,

interestingly enough, when I was young, I noticed that they became more vulnerable people while drinking.

Oh, that's so true.

They would tell me their feelings.

We would connect.

It looked like fun, you know.

And so I got like the memo, oh, this is what we do.

And this also supports the idea of

splitting myself from soccer player into normal person.

Like, oh, I'm going to prove that I can be a normal person

as much as I'm going to prove that I can be the best soccer player.

And so I took drinking on as like the thing I did whenever I wasn't playing soccer.

I did it through college and then my young adult life.

And

if I were to be really honest with myself and looking back at all the heartache that I had in my life, it was the very thing that I went to to

suppress,

at least that's what I thought at the time, to fix my heartbreak for whatever situation I was in and it was a it was a real love-hate relationship that drinking was

she was my best friend at times and also the the the biggest fucking bitch yeah yeah friend to me yeah

and i

loved her

i really did i really felt like

this is a part of my identity that i'm going to hold on to for dear life.

What did it look like, babe?

You're out drinking and then you're private and drinking.

It depended on where I was emotionally.

If I was in a good place, then it was just like free, fun-loving, you know, like everybody's out.

We're doing, we're doing really fun things.

And if I had any kind of heartache or something that I was trying not to know, it would be like me by myself

pouring the biggest glass of whiskey you've ever seen as like a quote-unquote nightcap.

Yep.

Wife goes to bed, and I'm just sitting alone on the couch with like a six-finger whiskey, a ridiculous amount of alcohol.

I was trying to black out.

I didn't have the off switch.

So until my body fell asleep, that's when I stopped consuming alcohol during certain seasons of my life.

I always was struggling struggling with, do I think that, do I think I'm drinking too much?

And, you know, I would do it for short periods of time because soccer for so much protected me from that part of myself.

It was like

this like safety mechanism that was in place.

So you couldn't go too far because then, yeah.

When I was on the road, I'd be on the road for three weeks.

I didn't have a single drink.

Totally fine.

That's why they say it's not how often you drink, it's how you drink.

Even if you only drink once a year, but you lose all of your mind and your life and your relationships yeah i was one of those people too that like was trying to get everybody to drink around me more

i had some friends that they could they could drink one glass of wine at dinner and i'm like the fuck no what no i don't i'm like the bottle is open you can't just you can't put that cork back in the bottle like the bottle needs to be finished what do we do once you pop you can't stop it's like wrinkles out there

aren't you just so jealous of those people who can just drink So, babe, what was your FIFA player of the year moment with drinking?

Like, when did you finally realize no matter how many rungs down I go on this drinking ladder, it's never going to love me back?

Oh, man.

Well, I think when she got my mug shot on the ESPN tucker,

that'll do it.

That'll do it.

She did me, she did me dirty.

She did you real dirty with that.

Tell us the story, please.

Tell us the story.

Yes.

It was a few days after I moved out of my house because of the divorce.

I was getting separated from my first wife.

And I went golfing and drank too much,

lied to my friends, told them I was getting an Uber.

And I drove.

Oh, baby.

I got behind the wheel of a car.

and ran a red light going back to my apartment.

And I was so deep in my own,

I don't know, sadness

and pity that I actually thought that I was sober.

Like I actually believed in my, I was like, oh, I haven't, I will not blow.

So I was like, yeah, we'll, let's do this.

And then I blew into the breathalyzer thing and I, I was now convinced that the machine was broken.

And I said, this is not right.

You need, I need another machine.

And of course, I was just completely

fucked.

And so I remember, you know, they, I had, I had Birkenstocks on that night

because I'm a gay person living in Portland, Oregon.

They issue you those, right?

Yes.

And I remember being in the jail cell and the other women that were in there, they had all of their

shoelaces taken out of their shoes.

And so they just kept walking around, sliding their feet.

And I kept thinking, these people are crazy.

This is not where I belong.

You know,

I remember crying so much before they actually took that mug shot.

I literally couldn't stop crying to take the mug shot.

And it was a horrific photo.

It looked like I was, I don't know, it was the worst night of my life.

I think my life is over.

As I start sobering up, sitting there,

I realize, oh my gosh, you do belong here.

You are fucked up.

You are exactly them.

You just got lucky that you were wearing fucking Birkenstocks.

What was in the car?

So I had been moving all of my stuff.

And that morning I had went and got all of my gold medals, my jewelry.

I got a, for my 100th cap playing on the national team.

The most valuable pieces to my existence as a person were in my car.

The car now is going to get parked on the side of the street because I can't drive my car.

And I like begged the police officers.

I was like, my whole life is in this one bag.

I like need to bring this one bag, please.

And so I begged them and they had to check it in at the police department when we got there, the police station.

What were the days after that like?

What were they like in your home?

So

surprisingly, my ex picked up the phone because I made my one phone call.

And

she picked up the phone and she came and bailed me out of jail the next morning.

And I went back to the house that

she and I lived in.

And there were news cameras outside.

I thought my life was over.

Like, I thought everything that I had spent my life building and doing,

playing soccer, traveling the world, fighting for women's equality,

I now was going to be put in the category of

canceled.

And so I hold up in my house and I remember just like

crying and watching the ESPN ticker and just seeing my mug shot over and over and over again.

You were watching it?

Like you turned it on to watch it?

Wow.

That's very

sarcastic of you.

Yeah.

I had to create a statement, like a public statement to put out to the press.

And

the one that I first created was much more mean to myself than the one put out into the world.

I was really fucking doing a number.

I was beating myself up like nothing, like I had never been beaten up.

I don't know what was happening, but something was happening.

And then my agent sat down.

My lawyer sat down at the table the next day and explained the process.

And in Oregon, where I was arrested, I could enter in what's called a diversion program.

And this diversion program would require me to be alcohol and drug-free for one year.

I'd have to take drug tests.

I'd have to do victim impact.

panel.

I'd have to do therapy that was

court ordered and moderated.

And when the lawyer told me that I could not legally drink for a year,

I like, I let out a kind of,

God, I'm getting emotional thinking about it, but

it was kind of like the sob that.

Like you scream when like you're a baby just born, like

you finally got your first breath.

And you know, somebody like took the keys away from me, literally.

And somebody like took,

took my choice away.

And that's all I needed.

Like, I needed that so much.

I needed somebody to be like, can't do it anymore, or else you'll be in jail.

Like, I needed,

and I needed every second of the shame that that ESPN ticker gave me.

I needed all of

the wake-up call

this opportunity gave me.

And it needed to be as big as it was for me to wake up, to, for me to actually see what was happening

in my life.

And I remember in the moment being like, okay,

I am going to make this the best thing that ever happened to me.

Like this is,

this is horrible right now and sad.

And I actually had a 10-stop speaking tour that was happening in one week

to college campuses across the country.

Oh, Lord.

That is a kick in the shorts.

I had to go out into the world in a week.

I remember actually being in my first airport

a week later, and some

person was standing close to me and they had googled me because they thought it was me.

I was wearing like a hat

and I could see my mug shot

on their phone.

That was the first thing that comes up.

Yeah, I was like, oh, so this is it.

This is how it's going to be, right?

Yeah.

And I really wanted to process and proceed with all of that happened with honesty and truth and integrity.

And I wanted to be as upfront and honest about it as possible.

And so

I don't know

how this story necessarily ends, but,

I've been sober ever since that day, that night in jail.

That's incredible.

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Babe, I want to talk about one more hard thing.

One more hard thing?

And then we will stop the hard things.

Okay.

Okay, but we cannot do a conversation with you about love and unrequited love

without talking about the major romantic relationship in your life that was an unrequited love.

And how would you define unrequited?

It's when you just

desperately love something.

and it never loves you back.

And I actually don't think that it's love.

so there would be more it would be a more complicated answer than that but like our cultural definition of

unrequited love is when you love something fully and it never loves you back like drinking is unrequited love soccer was unrequited love but it was a lot of amazing things yeah it's one-way love it's one but but which isn't love it's a relationship that you're having with someone who is not having that relationship back with you.

Yes.

That is sort of this relationship.

And you correct me if I'm wrong, that this was

a great unresolved,

agonizing

romance in your life, the one we're about to talk about.

How would you describe this relationship?

How did it start?

Take us back.

Real softball there.

But doesn't everybody have one love where when someone asks them, they just go, oh, absolutely.

Mine parallels yours a little bit, Abby.

So I mean, I'm happy to go down with this ship, too.

That makes me feel better.

Well, I think that

I've had a lot of time to think about this over the last almost 20 years.

But we

met about 20 years ago.

And it was early on in my national team career.

This person was, she was just completely unique to the kind of person I'd ever met before, adventurous, active,

seemingly like super

connected.

She was just fucking cool.

And I aspired to be the kind of person that somebody like her would love.

I felt like, oh, this person's going to make me better.

You ever met somebody like that where you're like, oh, yeah.

Like

me?

Yeah.

Oh, that's sweet.

So

we met

and we fell in love.

And I should have seen the red flags early on,

but I didn't because I was so into the fantasy of and the idea of this love.

And was she straightish?

She was straightish.

She was straightish.

Yeah, she was straightish.

Would that be one of the red flags you thought you should have noticed?

Well, not always.

Not at the time.

Not at the time.

She was straight by the side of Abby, I would say.

Okay, okay.

And she was painfully honest.

She had this way of being so brutally honest that it made me trust her.

Have you ever met somebody like that?

Yeah.

Well, that's the thing with you.

You think if people are mean, that that means they're honest and that that's love.

Yeah, I don't know.

We were living such different lives.

And

I guess one of the big red flags early on should have been that she was never able to like actually define the relationship with me.

I was always trying to nail that down in some way.

And it was like this elusive

love is not definable and all this stuff.

But when we were together, it was amazing.

And I'd see her for like a week here or a week there for months.

And then not months.

We would not see each other.

And this is not back in the day where texting and stuff was a constant occurrence.

You'd have to like actually call the person.

You have to pay for like Skype minutes.

Like it was, it was harder to stay in touch back then.

I know.

Yeah.

And

this was something that went on for a little while, like a year or two.

And I think

ended,

specifically ended because she got engaged.

I went, gosh, when was this?

I decided after we won the gold medal in 04 that I was going to go on a solo trip.

And so I drove my Jeep across the country.

I was going to go to Moab and Zion and Bryce Canyon and the Grand Canyon.

And

on my drive from Florida,

I just like took a U-turn and went to her house.

And I'll start my solo trip by going to visit someone.

And if every time you try to take your metaphorical solo trip and your car veers to a certain person or substance or whatever that might be a sign yeah that this is the distraction you're using from yourself yeah i drove through the night it took me 32 hours to get there

a short detour of 32 hours it was so ridiculous and so i get there and she's surprised to see me opens the door

and won't let me into her apartment, which I thought was like kind of weird.

And so we went and sat on the hood of my Jeep.

Um, and then she proceeds to tell me that she slept with somebody

that day.

And that's why I couldn't come in to the house.

Um, the person was there.

I don't know if they were there.

Honey, they were there.

She wouldn't let you in the house, for God's sake.

I actually don't really have vivid memories of that, the whole experience, but I remember feeling pretty heartbroken.

Yeah.

And went on my little solo trip by myself.

And

I was just so sad.

I was so sad and so confused.

A couple months later, maybe a year later, I don't know exactly the timeline, but I'm at practice, national team practice.

And one of my friends says to me, Did you hear so-and-so is engaged?

And so-and-so is this person that I've loved.

And I like, you've never, you have probably never seen the blood drain from a human being's face like it did that day.

I just, I shut down.

I was like, what?

How did this happen without me knowing?

We were still in kind of contact, but not like as consistent before because the sleeping with somebody else was a little bit really hard for me to accept.

Well, she goes on.

She gets married.

She has kids, the whole thing.

And during this time, I get into relationships and get out of relationships.

And every single time i would get out of a relationship i would call her and there was always still this

energy

this

i miss you i love you

thing from her too yeah this vibe that was like always there was keeping you hanging there she she liked you exactly where you were And for whatever reason, the fantasy of this love was keeping me there too.

You know, like this wasn't just a

horrible, one-sided, like she's a horrible person and I'm like the good person here.

Like I was also a part of this toxic experience.

Granted, she was married with children and probably should have had the integrity

to say, I'm going to, I, I can't do this anymore because I have this whole other life.

And she knew that's what you wanted more than anything in the world.

So she also knew that keeping you hanging there with her would allow her to have the thing

and have you and would keep you from ever having the thing.

Yeah.

And you would only have this 10% version of her.

Yeah.

Do you think that there's any part of this that has to do with growing up queer in the time you grew up in?

In terms of this tragic,

yeah, like broke back mountain.

This idea that queer kids are taught that like the

since they can't have out in the open love,

that the only kind of love that they can have is like dark and brooding and incomplete.

And that what we tell ourselves about that is that that's better anyway.

That that's the only real love is the

underneath, mysterious love.

And so you stay there because you don't think you can ever have the other thing.

And you just tell yourself that that's what's real.

Yes.

And also P.S.

Sister Brokeback Mountain was and is one of my favorite movies to this day because it reminded me so much of this unrequited love.

It made me, it like,

every, I feel like every gay person, at least my age, understands that movie on a totally different level.

And in your head, you're like, the love that that, that that person has, like broke back love is

they just feel like they have to do this family thing, but their real love is with me.

Yeah.

But you actually don't know if that's true.

That could be true.

And in some of the stories, that is true.

And in some of the stories, those people have their real love in that family or that other relationship they're living out.

And they're just super interested in this drama and having the best of all possible worlds by having this undefinable, can't get me in trouble because I'm not technically doing anything wrong love

on the side.

Yeah.

And that's a very

true champion.

Because that's not real.

What I have here, that's not real, but you were very real.

Yeah.

I have a question too.

Did you call when you and

your ex broke up?

Was my ex-wife?

Yes, your ex-wife.

Was so-and-so the first person you called?

Yep.

Yeah.

And I hadn't gotten arrested yet.

I I hadn't gotten sober yet.

So I was, I made the phone call after a long

drinking night out.

And

I actually,

I think in my memory,

because I was pretty intoxicated, I asked her to leave her husband and to

be with me.

Yep.

Thinking, oh, this has to be the thing.

This is the thing that's going to fix me.

This is what my problem has been all along.

God, we so badly want to make sense of ourselves, right?

This is the same.

I did the exact same thing.

I did that.

And, um,

yeah, she said no,

obviously, like she had been saying for 15 years, or how well she was saying no, but yeah, but I love you and I miss you.

So, I don't know how to, I guess, the way that it kind of ends is when I get sober

with some like real

helpful therapy, I was able to call her and tell her

all of

the way the years of being the hang, being, what is it called?

Like being the strung along.

Strung along.

The side piece, we call that.

Well, I mean, there was nothing, there was nothing physical that ever happened.

After she got married, we never, there was no physical, it was just this emotional thing that, that I think that I realized maybe I was experiencing on my own.

And for the first time as a sober person,

I got the courage to call her and say, this is bullshit.

And the fact that

you have strung me along for this long

has

prevented me from living a full life and probably in many ways prevented me from having a real relationship.

Yeah.

I told her it was unfair and

she agreed.

She agreed with everything that I said and

was kind

and I told her that I never ever wanted to talk to her again and not out of like

meanness

or

self-protection, but like I don't want people like that in my life.

I don't want people like that that say one thing and do another.

I don't want somebody that says that they love me,

but

won't ever do anything to prove it.

Because that was a whole relationship that was

provably making me believe that I was unlovable over and over and over and over again.

You weren't worth choosing.

Yeah.

And I know that

gayness and sexuality played a little bit of a role in this whole thing,

but I'm good enough to be chosen.

You know, and I had to actually say those words.

I had to actually be intentional and say the things

that I really meant.

And I really did love her.

And in some ways, this fantasy of the love kept me company for a lot of years.

It was a source of a lot of heartbreak.

It was also the source of a lot of joy

because having those in-love feelings is wonderful at times.

But I needed to stop it.

I needed to quit.

And, you know, in good old brokeback mountain fashion, it was hard to quit her, but I finally did.

Did she put up any resistance?

Like, did she try to rationalize with you?

Like, oh, but we can still keep in touch.

No, no, she got okay.

She understood.

She knew what was needed.

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So, where we are in your story right now,

just this one lens we're looking at it through.

You have now

lost soccer, ended soccer.

Yeah, because I retired, soccer ended, and drinking really ramped up.

So, soccer is over,

your marriage is over,

and the drinking is over.

Yeah.

This is where we are right now.

Yeah.

Many of your unrequited loves are over.

Can you talk to us

about the night at the Palmer house?

It's a seemingly normal event.

I have to go do.

I'm just about to publish forward the memoir that I wrote soon after I retired, and I'm traveling with

a manager kind of person, and they hand me the book

of information of the other authors who are going to be there who are also trying to promote their books for their upcoming releases.

And so I scan through the authors and I'm like, nah, nah, nah.

And then I see Love Warrior on there and I read the little bio that Glennon had,

and it had something in there like about being sober.

I was newly sober

and I remember being like, oh, that's a sober person.

I've heard of those people, but I've never met one.

Yeah, I'm going to talk to that person.

Because the truth is, I really swear to you, like, I had never really met

a sober person.

Didn't know a single sober person.

I had created a whole life around me that it was just people who partied to support my addiction and my habit.

So we walk in

and we're like running a little late which is like my biggest pet peeve and i had said i don't want to have dinner and i i guess all the authors who we were all going to be up on the stage giving little talks about our books um to the librarians of the world we love you librarians so i walk into this back room backstage and all the authors are all in there eating And I'm late.

I didn't know that this was like a private backstage event before the event starts.

It was a table with George Saunders, Terry McMillan, Maria Semple.

I didn't know any of those people.

I still don't know any of those people.

Yeah, all I cared about was meeting the sober person there.

And so when I walk in and somebody stands up in the room, that was me.

I recognize that it's the person that I actually am there to hopefully talk to at some point.

So I walk around, we hug, and then I sit down in my chair.

And the way that we were seated, she was away from me and kind of at a weird angle.

So she was in like the peripheral of my vision, not in my clear path.

And so I kept talking to this one author and he seemed kind enough, but I kept looking over to her, like

more interested in wanting to know what they're talking about over there.

with her seatmate than I was interested in talking to my seatmate.

So then the dinner ends and all the authors like want to take a picture together.

We walk outside and Glennon's like nowhere to be found.

I'm like, where is she?

You know, this is so, she's the reason why I want to take a picture.

But now that you know me so long, you would know where I was now, right?

You were in the bathroom.

I hide in the bathroom as many times as possible and just hide there for as many minutes as it won't seem weird.

Yeah, you were in the bathroom.

And then

you came back and we all took a picture.

So when we are walking to the stage, I finally get the seconds that I'm like hoping to talk to you about because I had yet to figure out what I was going to include in the memoir forward.

And so I really wanted your advice about, I just got the DUI.

I knew I could talk to you about it because you're sober.

And you just said some things, like you touched my arm.

It was just like electricity.

I was like, oh, like a shock.

Something happened to my system.

And I kind of didn't pay any real attention to it.

And then when we sat on the dais, we were seated next to each other.

And I was so glad to to be seated next to you.

I don't know if you remember what we were talking about on that walk, which is that whoever wanted you to write that book

like the shiny version of you.

Yeah.

Just when you talk about your two halves.

Yes.

Everybody wanted you to write it just as your shiny soccer player.

Soccer self.

Yes.

They did not want you to include any of what you call your shadow side, which was really just all the real stuff.

Yeah.

In the book, because

they thought that would tarnish your Captain America

reputation.

You said to me,

it was like, you thought, it was like you were revealing the deepest, darkest secret.

But the first thing you said to me was, you probably know what's going on because you had just gotten the DUI.

And I was like,

about

what?

And you were like, well, it's all over ESPN.

And I was like, that doesn't help me.

And

you said, I just got a DUI.

And you said you wanted, you were thinking about including all of your struggles inside your memoir,

but you were afraid that people wouldn't like you anymore or something.

Yeah.

I mean, I think I was afraid of tarnishing the soccer Abbey legacy, the soccer star legacy.

And you, when you touched me, you said, sweetheart, oh, sweetheart.

We in the real world.

like

real people.

And it was just like this really simple thing

that

I think like my intuition and my sober, my newly sober self was like feeling.

And when you said that, I was like, yes.

It was an invitation to integration.

It was an invitation to say to you, you don't have to be these two things anymore.

That's right.

We want both of you.

In fact, what the hell is a memoir if not all this shot?

It was an invitation from the soccer world into the real world where you'd get to be your whole self.

That's right.

That's interesting.

I've never thought of it that way.

Me neither until now.

You gave me an opportunity to integrate my two selves

in that second.

And then you went up and talked about your book that you were publishing.

And I was so excited.

First of all, you like made me laugh and cry and all the things.

And there was just like this unmistakable, unquestionable energy that was happening between us.

But it felt like for the first time, somebody was seeing the whole of me

and not wanting to discard what I would have called then the shadow side, like the bad Abbey, good Abbey, bad Abbey.

You were like, no, like

that's the good stuff.

You've got this all backwards.

And

so, yeah, I went back to my room that night and I read

Love Warrior until one or two in the morning.

I was a little disappointed with the way that it ended.

So was I, babe.

So was I.

That puts us completely full circle back at the beginning of the conversation we had in the last episode.

Because when we were talking about how Dr.

Franco says that if you're holding something back, you can't accept love because you don't trust it.

And I wonder if the Palmer house was,

it was

the opposite of that moment because there wasn't anything you could do to hold back at that point or keep hidden.

Like it was all over ESPN.

It was all over the ticker.

And

since it was all out there,

if someone were to love you in that space,

then that would mean that you could trust it.

Whereas before, when you only had

Shiny Abbey at the front and shadow Abbey, you would never be able to really accept and trust love because you'd be thinking, Yeah, but you don't know about Shadow Abbey.

That's right.

I think that's why I have so much

feeling for

your first wife.

You're amazing at talking about what a

great love we have, and me, and why you love me so much.

And we do have an incredible love story, an incredible love.

But what was different

then

was not just that me, was not just that I was a new person.

It was that for the first time, you were fully and completely present.

Like you were fully available.

The drinking was gone.

The soccer was gone.

It was just like all of you there.

All of the unrequited love

was also because you weren't there fully to love.

And I know there was a moment where your ex-wife

asked if you were having a conversation with her and you explained that you were in love and all the things.

And she said, have you stayed sober?

Yeah.

And you said yes.

And she burst out crying.

And I just have such feeling.

I know it was messy.

I know there's a lot there, but I do have this like big love for her because I feel like she knew in that moment that you were going to be available in the next phase of your life in a way that you weren't available in the last one.

I feel like everybody has that in their life.

The things that went wrong, and then you know, the person's going to be better for the next thing, but like you're the one who did all

struggling.

Yeah.

And I don't have any tender feelings for the one that left you hanging on all the time.

I'm just going to say that.

But I feel like you are who you have always

wanted to be.

The way that you love,

It's like watching someone who is like the greatest painter in the world.

And since they're painting you,

everyone's looking at the painting thinking, she's amazing.

Look at her.

But the person sitting for the painting

only looks that good because the painter is so freaking amazing at painting.

That's how you love me.

And I feel

so grateful that I get to be the one who is loved by you.

Because you were right all the time.

Your whole life, you were right.

You were meant to love big and love huge and love with all of your being.

And what you needed was somebody who would be fully present and there and be in it with you.

Yeah.

and be a hundred percent with you.

And I get to be that.

Yes.

And I think for a lot of my life, I just thought that there was going to to be some other thing that's like other love that was going to fix me and make me feel lovable.

And I think that what I've learned from our relationship and the work we've done

is

the only source of

working through that heartache or that like

emo angst.

I don't know what it is that like this seeking for more.

I had to figure out how to love myself.

And we had a very amazing, intense

love story.

But we've also created a lot of space, a lot of safe space for each other to be able to learn how to love ourselves really deeply.

Because, in the end, I think that that is what I've been searching for.

Um, you've been like this beautiful

space giver and the safety net that

almost like I needed somebody strong enough and safe enough and that would love me so hard and so well that I could fake myself into believing that it was possible for me to do it myself.

You gave me this like

runway of lovability.

I keep looking at you and I'm like, okay, maybe it is possible.

Maybe I am actually lovable.

She's pretty smart.

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Abby, you mentioned in the

first episode how you were at FIFA and that's the moment that you got the best player of the world award

and

the love didn't sink into you.

And you realized, well,

if I can't feel the love after this, then soccer is never going to be able to fill that void.

Have you ever had a moment

where you have received love in the moment and you could feel it immediately?

Like,

click, that sinks in.

I get that.

this takes.

Yep.

Well, it happened a couple of months ago.

An unsuspecting Christmas morning.

The kids are going around, they're unwrapping their gifts.

And all of a sudden, Glennon's like, Abby, it's your turn.

And I was like, adults go later in the morning.

You know, what's happening?

So I'm opening up this present, and it's this letter from a lawyer that is is essentially

Glennon has started the process with

consent from Craig that

the kids want me to adopt them as their parent legally.

And there's like a lot of mixed feelings in that because

You know, we've talked before that like there is a grief that I will live out with the rest of my life for not biologically carrying a child of my own.

But that gets completely overshadowed with like the love and the

joy of parenting these three children that Glennon and Craig brought into the world.

And

I guess it's hard to explain for like a step parent who might not have like a biological connection to their stepkids or bonus kids, like we call it.

But

I don't know.

It was like one of those moments.

It was like

one of those moments in life that,

no offense, honey, but it's one thing to have

your romantic partner

show you, tell you, marry you, and

make you believe that you are lovable.

And it's like a whole not level of proof that I am a lovable person

when

these three children,

14, 16, and 19 at the time,

and their father and Craig,

you know, I'm like, it's essentially like the most crying I've ever, like the hardest crying, like the wail cry,

like a similar cry when I first got sober.

Like,

I don't know how to describe it well enough.

It's just

if it makes sense, there's like brief moments in a person's life where all of your heartache makes sense.

Like, every single heartbreak and issue that I had was because I didn't know that

I would be chosen.

I first had to figure out how to love myself well enough, and I had to

find a love.

But, like,

the kids don't have to do that.

Our life would have been, would have gone forward with no problems.

Like, they want that.

They, like,

they want, they want me

in a person way, in a parent way

um

and so that happened and so we're in the process right now of

getting me added and not taking away any parental rights of craig or glennon but getting a third parent added to our kids birth certificates

and it was just

obviously it means a lot to me it's just

I don't know how,

I just don't know how I'll ever thank you all.

And I know that that's not how love works.

It's just,

I told Glennon, she better not leave me because now I'll take the kids.

The kids said, the kids said, three Christmases?

I don't think it's for you to thank them.

I I think that was their way of thinking you.

I just,

so much of my life has

felt

like there was a

thread of sorrow

or shadow or darkness.

And

that's

not true.

Like, it was all necessary

and

part of my process.

And

I needed every bit of it

to feel that moment

of like

love.

Wow.

All right, Pod Squad, here's what we've decided to do.

We can't just break that news of the Christmas adoption moment without explaining it more.

So, tomorrow, we're going to give you a bonus episode where we talk about how the adoption has come together and that moment in our family when we told Abby and what happened and all the implications of it for our family and for other families because it's turned into kind of a big deal.

And we want to share it with you.

So, come back tomorrow for a short episode where we give you the dates on the adoption.

We'll see you then.

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