Taking My Life Back Read online

  The doctors and nurses were politely unsympathetic. This baffled me. Everyone had been so attentive. Suddenly pain was no big deal? I had been blessed to be brought back to my hometown, but it felt as though this had to be a mistake. Why did I hurt this much? And how was I supposed to live with an emotional fragility that wasn’t good for anybody?

  For me, the PTSD resulting from the whole experience had been pretty well held at bay until now. But suddenly, leaving the womb of the Boston hospital and going out into the world, flying on a small plane, and feeling the torment of increased physical pain all combined to leave me feeling as if I was suffocating. The air felt depleted of oxygen. I was a bony fish out of water.

  For nearly five weeks, the repeated assaults of the debriding surgeries had felt like taking a beating every other day from people who like you and who are sorry to have to do it. Even so, up to this point I was spared much of the anxiety and free-floating panic attacks that went on underneath my recovery because I was sedated so often that the chemicals kept them at bay most of the time. I had often felt the suffocating sensations lingering in the back of my mind, but that was all.

  Now my return to home territory forced me to consider aspects of the future that I hadn’t had to face while I was isolated in a hospital far from home. Noah needed me to get myself back together, even if I still couldn’t do a lot of the things I used to do for him, but I had the distinct notion that I was moving backward and everything was falling apart.

  Mom quietly endured my rants about “this lousy hospital” and my very helpful suggestions that I needed to go back to Boston, where they “understood” me. Of course, what they understood in Boston, as well as in Houston, was that I had reached the limits of what pain meds could do for me and was entering the realm where the drugs were part of the problem.

  At one point I started protesting, “I’m not a drug addict! I legitimately need this medication!”

  Thank God my dependency was relatively mild and the doctors were well aware that what I needed was to begin living without so much of the medication. Nevertheless, when I was in the thick of it and tried to imagine a future day when a few aspirin might do the trick, the picture refused to come into focus.

  Mom said this was the only time during my entire hospital stay that I failed to be pleasant to the staff. She was sympathetic but she trusted the doctors’ judgment on this. To me that felt like some sort of betrayal by my personal advocate.

  The professionals in Houston were as skilled and as caring as anyone could ask. They had the difficult job of helping me adjust to being the kid who transfers into a classroom in the middle of the school year, and in that spirit they moved me toward getting ready to go home.

  The pain remained. In truth, the pain pulled up a chair right next to me and settled in as part of the new normal. Although I was still struggling to maintain a prayerful outlook, I did feel myself gain a little strength by having that as a focal point.

  Amid all this, it took a few days before I could see that the only answer was to cut out the meds.

  I’m thankful that my emotional instability went away after those first few rough days in Houston, once my system was cleared of most of the heavy chemicals. The artificially dark tint to my worldview passed. It felt like being barely missed by a tornado.

  −4−

  Prayer without Words

  My mother played a vital role in my recovery, taking care of me and the rest of our family with the same loving dedication she had always shown. It was consistent with the dedication she had shown all of us many years earlier, when she had finally decided that the household was so badly broken that she needed to file a restraining order against my father and move herself and her kids into her parents’ home. I was only eight years old.

  My grandparents graciously took us in, which allowed Mom to get a full-time job with UPS. We called them Grammy and Grandaddy, and they were both wonderful to us, just as loving as they could be, and my grandaddy was the first close-up experience I can recall of a genuinely loving family man. A true gentleman. I had no idea how blessed I was; I only knew I loved his company.

  Until we all left for our new home with our grandparents, the limitations of my youth and inexperience kept me blind to the patience and nobility of my mother’s struggle in making this move. When it later became clear to me, it crystalized my concept of what it means to be a Christian woman in today’s world.

  Maybe my sense of helplessness after the bombing would have been just as bad if my background were different. And maybe the torment would have been just as great if helplessness hadn’t been a common theme of my early life. But it was, and our pasts shadow us.

  My earliest memories are based on an urgent need to recognize the difference between how things look to the outside world and how they actually are, behind closed doors. For people like us, the power of our need to quickly figure out that difference is equal to the danger we face if we fail. Pain is a powerful teacher.

  As the eldest of three daughters in the family of a charismatic and handsome preacher, my life appeared idyllic, especially if people didn’t get close, which my father managed carefully. But despite appearances, our house was never safe. At home, his charisma dissolved into a petulant and grumbling form of dissatisfaction. It could flare at any given moment and blow up into emotional tirades or truly dangerous rage.

  In the days since the bombs went off, I’ve met too many other people whose background was the same. Even if their circumstances were different on the outside, the reality behind closed doors matched mine. Their home was never safe either.

  And so, as a little girl, my primary art and skill became that of avoiding the outbursts. Every time I failed I wound up taking another scorching, with screamed accusations and criticisms over my endless list of flaws. If you’ve ever showered underneath a flamethrower, you get the idea.

  At those moments, that charming man who made the whole family look so good when we were outside the home transformed in my eyes into a dangerous and intimidating creature who prowled our lives in search of a reason to explode. I had learned that the key to dealing with the invisible minefield created by his personality was to rapidly figure out what was genuine and what was false. Doing that helped to minimize the psychological damage inflicted when the blame and accusations were turned toward me.

  If we were outside and our smiling father told a neighbor he was taking us inside for ice cream, it was vital to run the past few hours back through my memory in search of anything that might have made him angry. If he was storing up an outburst, then the ice cream story would just be an excuse to get us back inside the house, alone with him.

  If I overheard such a thing, I could possibly slip away while he wasn’t looking, acting as if I didn’t hear him. Then I could manage to avoid being around when it was time to go in.

  But since I couldn’t get away with running off every time I suspected his motives, the challenge was to figure out the truth and react in an instant. Stay or go?

  Because the thing is sometimes it would really just be about ice cream or something equally harmless. The dangerous aspect was not knowing which was which. For that reason, I became desperate for authenticity.

  And in those times when I couldn’t make out the difference between what was true and what was just a dressed-up fake, I did the only thing I could: I dodged the whole conflict and retreated into a young girl’s fantasy life.

  That might be the reason my first conscious memories kick in at about age six, which is pretty late into childhood, I must admit. Those memories consist of sitting up in the branches of a backyard tree, removing myself from ground level, where my dangerous home stood. The house itself was nice enough, a parsonage provided by our church. It was the household within it that I couldn’t get my head around.

  As the eldest sister, maybe it was natural for me to receive so much of the anger. I had more responsibilities, more ways to fail to get the job right, more chances to disappoint.

  Some
days I walked right through the invisible land mines and it was all fine. On other days, though, one of the many things I did that angered him or one of the little ways I failed to deliver would set off another explosion. No amount of determination in applying myself was enough to keep from causing outrage and being on the receiving end of a harsh and sustained outburst. The physical violence, at that point, was not as big a problem as the scorn and contempt. He kept an internal list to use during his personal tirades, assuring me I would never amount to anything.

  Any time he didn’t take his anger out on me, he took it out on my mother. And she was his target a lot of other times as well. For years she endured his rages without striking back. She wore her role as the woman of the house like an iron suit, stayed inside it, and tied herself in knots to keep the peace.

  For me the long-term effect was rather like the old Chinese tradition of binding a little girl’s feet. In our house the bindings were made of my father’s rage and contempt. Beneath them, my sense of self became shrunken and deformed. Those of us who have been through this process know that it happens without producing visible scars, but the effect is no less real.

  I was not much older than my son on the day of the bombing when it was made clear to me that I was a major source of turmoil in the home. My father had all sorts of bad news for me in his ongoing list of my failings. It seemed as if the fact that I was in the house at all made him angry.

  However, when you are invited to attend your own bashing and are helpless to avoid it, I learned there was nothing else to do but mentally vacate the situation. Head for the trees. We had a big one in the backyard, and I spent a lot of time there.

  Today, when there is no longer any threat from him, I can see so easily through an adult’s eyes that his anger had little or nothing to do with me and was much more of a reflection of his personal frustration with himself and the circumstances of his life. Of course, back then, when that information may have eased the anxiety of trying to live with him, such knowledge was as hidden from me as any of the universe’s great secrets.

  But when we stepped into the view of others, the head of our family became wonderful. When my father spoke from the pulpit on Sunday mornings, women fell silent in admiring obedience. Men listened and gave knowing nods of agreement. Meanwhile his wife and his daughters sat in the front pew, attentive to his words and bearing witness to his prowess as a family man.

  My father’s charm gave him power that way. Like a truly great salesman, he made others want to join his team, to agree with him and meet his approval, to ride the wave of good feeling that came from his affable company. He could have sold anything, but his choice was to sell biblical teachings and homilies from the pulpit, pulling a flock around himself like a warm winter blanket. Attendance at his sermons carried the promise of a solid dose of endorphins. He was able to fuel himself on others’ hunger for the good feelings his charm provided. You had to love him. You just had to.

  If I wasn’t careful, I sometimes started to feel rotten for disappointing a man who was so clearly loved and respected by his congregation. What did it mean when such a man held me in contempt? I was too young to unravel his mercurial personality. All I could do was use my hunger for knowledge like a little bloodhound to help in my search for what was true.

  Naturally, prayer was a part of my life then. But the experience was hollow. I couldn’t connect to the process because prayer itself came from my father’s world of church and pulpit. I went through the act of praying, determined to be a good girl, without having a clear idea of what that actually meant. The definition seemed to change with my father’s moods.

  Eventually, my body took on a deep level of tension that kept me ready to jump away from a blow. That constant fight-or-flight mode did a real number on my ability to be still and know the Lord.

  My drive for authenticity and for things that were true, for people or things I could trust, was sparked by all the times I heard his accusations about my failings and somehow understood they were false. To determine what the truth actually was, I had to know exactly what he meant, then compare that to what seemed true to me. If I worked it out, then I could go through the motions of placating him without giving up all of myself and becoming nothing. I would know better.

  Some days it worked and some days it didn’t.

  Back then, I couldn’t have told you what was wrong with me, but I had already absorbed the message that I didn’t deserve my father’s kindness because of my many flaws. My head understood that it wasn’t true, but the message seeped in some other way.

  For years, my mother was the one who consistently maintained a godly presence in our home, for her husband and all three of us girls. Her role as peacekeeper resulted in her constant litany that when Dad was home, we should just keep quiet and stay out of the way.

  So we made this false picture for the world. Back then, I had no idea how many people do their own version of this. So many are stuck in that place at this very moment.

  On most Sundays I was able to keep my shortcomings in check and play the role of Obedient Preacher’s Daughter. It was the only way to find any peace once we got home. Even at that early stage, I had a major case of OPD.

  If you’ve had to internalize your stresses because it wasn’t safe to be honest about them, or if you’re in a life situation right now where you can’t express yourself with safety, then I’m betting you already know about stress illness. You know from your own experience of it.

  And so, even though I had discovered a temporary coping mechanism in the branches of that backyard tree, a little girl’s mind tricks couldn’t do a thing to protect me once I had to climb down and walk back inside. As anyone who has been in a similar situation knows, the way you get yourself to go back inside a dangerous house—when you have no other choice but to go—is to remember that sometimes your sense of danger will be mistaken. Sometimes your fears will all be for nothing. And maybe this time it will be nothing. The Golden Maybe.

  So you go. Meanwhile you work on your skills at spotting land mines from a distance.

  While I was lying on that Boston street, my biological father never once appeared in my thoughts, nor did he do so at any time during that horrible ambulance trip. I didn’t play back any images of him during the short time I was still awake in the hospital either. Since Mom had divorced him by the time I was eight, I was accustomed to his absence from both my days and my thoughts.

  I know that my mom hated the idea of divorce. It went against everything she felt about the importance of family life. Because of that, she resisted the idea of breaking up the family for years. But she grew so worried by his increasing levels of rage that she finally confided her fears to me: she truly believed he would kill her if she tried to leave. I wonder how many people whisper such things to one another every day, in quiet places and hidden corners. It was awful to hear, but I didn’t need convincing. I knew I felt safe only with her and not with him.

  In order for Mom to consider leaving my father without leaving her children, she had to walk the tightrope of keeping any plans she might have away from him while also remaining cooperative enough at home to keep a lid on his anger levels. She had to maintain this delicate balance long enough to find a realistic alternative, which meant a full-time job for her and housing for all of us. Beneath the practical nightmare of making such a move there was the emotional torment of any Christian’s natural resistance to a cut-and-run approach to marital difficulties. But the equation changed for her when it came to physical safety in the home. She realized both her constancy in that marriage and her patience as a partner were working against her and her children. The situation only degraded our well-being.

  And so the breaking point for her turned out to be that same one suffered by mothers in similar situations around the world: the young lives of her children were too vulnerable to risk. She felt we were all in physical danger. The domestic turmoil had to stop.

  Amazingly, she survived the separation process withou
t violent conflict, though the divorce was nasty. They split custody of us kids in a sort of 90/10 proportion, with my father taking us on alternate weekends. The understanding was that if he activated his temper, he would lose all access to his children. At the time, some people might have seen my mom’s separation as a failure, but others saw it then and will see it now as a brave act by a loving mother on behalf of little girls who could not protect themselves.

  Freedom from that oppressive home life was a completely welcome change, as was freedom from a portrayal of a religious life that just never felt authentic to me. Both helped to set me on the path to a much deeper appreciation of what living for Christ means.

  They led me to the day I got my first strong tap on the shoulder from Jesus. I was ten years old. Mom and I were on a familiar excursion to the hospital for treatment of yet another asthma attack. I was diagnosed shortly after my parents divorced. These frequently hit me hard enough to require trips to the emergency room while I wheezed and fought to pull air into my lungs on the car ride over.

  My mother and I were standing in the hospital elevator. I think we were on our way down to get a chest X-ray. The struggle to breathe tended to make me self-focused, and I was not in a happy state.

  It happened there and then.

  There was no sense of a divine visitation, though. I never heard a voice. Instead, a bolt of awareness hit me that was too right, too real, and too deep to have come from my young mind. It was caused by a scene that played out right in front of us, when a very small girl was wheeled into our elevator by an attendant.

  She was so frail she appeared to be at death’s door. I felt a stab of pity. It lasted until she turned to me and hit me with a lovely smile and asked, “Isn’t it a beautiful day?”