• I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead

I'll Sleep When I'm Dead

~ writing my way through motherhood, doctorhood, post-PTSDhood and autism. sleeping very little.

Search results for: abraham

The Moment That Defines Us (In other words, I pulled an Abraham)

13 Saturday Feb 2021

Posted by elizabethspaardo in Uncategorized

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The United States Senate chose to acquit Donald Trump today. Everyone in that room knew that Trump was guilty. On top of that, they were the target of his crime. He tried to kill them. His followers still want to kill them. Many of them were afraid for their lives and their families if they voted to convict. We’ve heard nothing from Pence in all of this even though the traitors constructed a gallows from which to hang him. He’s hiding out, they say, because he’s afraid of more MAGA terrorists hurting him and his family.

Hmm, now where I have heard this before? Maybe I’m thinking of everyone from the janitor on up to head foot ball coach and local God, Joe Paterno, at Penn State that did nothing about serial child rapist Jerry Sandusky because they were afraid they’d lose their jobs. Or maybe the dozens upon dozens upon dozens of people who knew exactly what Jeffrey Epstein was doing and did nothing because they were afraid.

Feeling you might be killed is trauma. Being put in a situation where you can either choose to do the right thing and possibly die or do the wrong thing and live is the hardest thing you will ever have to decide. But it’s not difficult. There’s nothing complicated about stopping a child rapist or convicting an ex-President who committed treason and is clearly planning to try it again. There are no murky shades of gray.

To be placed in this position is a tremendous gift. That moment defines you. Everything before and everything after in your life accumulates to far less than the weight this moment carries in deciding if you are a good person or not. Other people have to go their whole lives plugging away at doing the right things day in and out, and always wondering in the back of their minds if they’re a good person. Those of us placed in the hard position outlined above get a beautifully dramatic and swift moment that cements our place in the moral universe.

I had such a moment and faced the very real fear of my beautiful babies, two and four at the time, and I being killed. I chose the right thing. We weren’t killed, but it almost destroyed me. I went through hell for years afterwards but I never doubted I was a good person and that I’d made the right choice. Even if it hadn’t worked out and he had killed me, I would have known I made the right choice. As the Spanish revolutionary Dolores Ibarruri said, it’s better to die on your feet than live on your knees.

But but but they’re afraid for their families too! Ahhh. Sounds noble to want to protect your family, after all. Even people who are giving and understanding and kind, committed to religion and democracy and equality and all the other good things, falter when you bring their family into it. They justify their choosing what they know is wrong by saying they were protecting their family. Who could argue with that? Me I guess. Clearly I didn’t choose this path. We come to the story of Abraham then.

God tells Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. Abraham obeys but God spares Isaac at the last moment. And God is well pleased with Abraham. I have atheist friends who point to this story as proof the Judeo-Christian God is, well, bad. What kind of loving God would do such a thing? And why should we consider Abraham a good person if he was willing to kill his own son? In truth, there are people who think I’m a bad mother and a bad person to have put my own children’s lives at risk to stop a man from hurting other children. And, in truth, I know this to be true because some people in my life said this to me. It sounds like something you write a three page paper about in your first year philosophy class. The safety of your family versus the greater good for humanity. Or like that train. The one that will hit ten people if you do nothing and will only hit one person if you flip the switch. Do you flip the switch and actively kill someone, or do nothing and passively allow ten people to die? What is the moral thing to do (or not do)?

The moment I called to turn him in, I prayed. I sat in my green mini van on a hot June day. The air conditioner was broken and my vents were blowing warm air in my face as I sat there sweating in a long, black heavy skirt from Land’s End. I sat and I prayed and said, “God please don’t let my babies die and please don’t let me die because they need me. If we die, then I guess that was your will because I know I’m doing the right thing.” In other words, I pulled an Abraham.

Plenty of Atheists make this choice as well, for the record. It isn’t about trusting God specifically. It’s about loving your fellow human beings and everything else in the universe, in the collective oneness. It’s about putting that love above fear. It’s as simple as that. There is no fear in love. It’s not easy, but it’s simple.

What people who take the easy way out don’t understand is that it isn’t the easy choice at all. It’s easy for one moment and hard for the rest of your life. You spend the rest of your life trying to make it sound difficult but it was really very simple. If it was difficult, then there was more than one right choice. If it was difficult, you did the best anyone would have in the same situation. If it was difficult, you really had no other choice, realistically speaking. After all, you’re only human. It’s not fair for anyone to judge you.

Viktor Frankl, Holocaust survivor and neuropsychiatrist-philosopher, wrote that “life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.” Forty-three senators chose to sell their souls today. It was a simple choice that cannot be bent and turned to look difficult. I would assume a lot of them are sociopaths without a conscience, but even sociopaths are human and have a knowing deep within them that they have done wrong. They’ve chosen the easy way and it will be with them always.

18 Saturday Jun 2022

Posted by elizabethspaardo in Evil, love, narcissism, parenting, PTSD, Rape, residency, Sin

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Tags

abuse, bats, empowerment, family, forgiveness, Justice, PTSD, rape, residency, silence, trauma, truth, viktor frankl

I got my living room and dining room ready to paint last night. It was a loooooot of painter’s tape. Like, a lot. I was spent by the time I finished. I headed to bed and decided to read a little of my book about Abraham Lincoln and John Brown and then go to sleep. I was soon interrupted, however, by my son telling me the toilet was flooding the bathroom. And it was.

I stood in 2 inches of water while plunging the toilet with one hand and holding up the ball float with the other. Tried to turn the water off but the valve wouldn’t budge. Once the toilet was unclogged my son helped me construct a duct tape sling to hold the ball float up while I researched how to fix it. I got out my single lady fix it guide

and it was fixed in no time. Well, it was a bit of a struggle but pretty quickly anyway.

I also replaced the P trap on my kitchen sink recently. And laid some flooring. In the past couple of years I have dealt with mice and bats, sewage back ups, the moving of numerous heavy objects and setting up of various electronics. And it makes me realize how much I let myself rely on other people to do so many things, basic things. Not just plumbing and heavy lifting. I spent so many years feeling like there were only a few very specific things I was capable in. There was always a dad or a husband to depend on. And that’s what I chose to do.

I don’t know if I’ll ever find my person and have a long term relationship but if I do, it will be very different than it always has been. Because I’m very different than I always have been. I used to want someone to take care of me and someone I could take care of. In a childlike way.

Dependent on each other, chasing and being chased by one another, idealizing and devaluing one another. Anything to avoid stillness, connection, intimacy, vulnerability. It’s not just romantic relationships. It’s with everyone in my life and even with myself.

So many people went mad with the pandemic because they were left alone with themselves. In silence and stillness. And so many of us fear it. Because we fear knowing ourselves. We fear the shame, the weaknesses, the parts we’ve been taught are unlovable. We fear ourselves. Because we are the ones that have kept us from getting that hole inside of us filled. Surely it must be our fault. And who would want to know someone like that? Spend time with someone like that?

Judith Herman says trauma is being abandoned. By everyone who was supposed to protect us, humans and God himself. But who is the one who ultimately failed us? It was us. It was me. I made my choices. I just didn’t know how bad it would get. Didn’t know it would never end.

I have a ritual I complete each time I move. My therapist taught me that when I was fixating on something I should picture taking that thought and putting it in a box and placing that box on a shelf for later. I was fixating on The Ordeal at the time so I took the court transcript and literally put it on a shelf in the hall closet. It worked. Now each time I move I take that box and put it in the hall closet of my new house. And if there is a day I need to take it down for a while, I do. And when I’m done I put it back.

My ex-husband reads this blog and looks for things to use against me. I wish he wouldn’t but such he life. My therapist asked me recently why I keep writing it if it bothers me. There are a lot of facets to that answer. One being that trauma is lonely. If you were in war or a natural disaster, you have other people who went through it with you. But most of us who were raped went through it alone. And sometimes you need to talk to someone who knows what it was like. And that person doesn’t exist. And for me, this blog, I know it reaches other people who’ve been through the same thing. Not a lot, but a few anyway. I feel like someone might be listening who understands. And sometimes, when the box is off the shelf, I really need that.

I do my best to forgive myself for the choices I’ve made because wallowing in guilt does no good and is insincere. It is an indulgence. I sit with myself, but sometimes it’s okay to need someone sitting there with you in the darkness. Not because you can’t be alone but because it would be nice to not be alone for a while.

I hope you are out there sitting with me. I hope you know I’m sitting with you too. He did unspeakable things to me. Maybe someone did to you too. I tried to not write about trauma today. I tried to write about how proud I am of myself for fixing the toilet. But I would be lying if I said the box isn’t down right now. That I didn’t read through his appeals last night, late into the night, long after the toilet was fixed and the water mopped up.

Fuck Ted Bundy

31 Thursday Mar 2022

Posted by elizabethspaardo in Catholicism, christianity, empathy, Evil, kids, love, marriage, my awesome husband, narcissism, outrage, parenting, PTSD, romance, Sin

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Tags

be my valentine, betrayal, children, divorce, empowerment, Evil, fallen world, family, good, Justice, love, meaning, narc, narcissism, original sin, Parenting, religion, silence, sock monkey, stars, trauma, true love, truth, vampire, viktor frankl

Flesh of my flesh

Bone of my bone

Leave your parents cleave to me 

I am your new home

Home forever

Til death do us part

And if I make you yearn for that end 

Why that’s hardness in your heart

For if you love God

You love marriage, you love me 

And you know when God joins together

You’ll never be free

Free to be who you really are

To follow the fate signed in your stars

No you are mine and I am yours 

Don’t lock your phone 

Don’t lock your doors

We are one in heart and soul 

We are both driven by the hole 

left behind by the barren wombs that birthed us underneath the moon

Mother moon has cried for us while Brigid’s fire inspired us 

To reach for something better than us 

Wait Did I say us? 

I meant me. 

You conjure planks in all our eyes 

But yours are fine 

(It’s a disguise) 

A pleasant reflection outside of you 

Rot and decay is what is true

What god has joined together I will put asunder 

For how can we be one when your trunk is putrid and diseased at its core?

Swoop up the fruit before it hits the floor 

If you can tell a tree by the fruit it bears you’ve done a damn good job of fooling God 

For our children are precious fruit indeed 

Owing little to your bitter seed 

They grow and bloom in spite of you 

Soaring so far past the height of you 

Knowing there is something not right with you

People look at the women that fell in love with Ted Bundy

Stood by Ted Bundy

Accepted a proposal in a courtroom from Ted Bundy

And they think these women are naive or dumb or victims themselves

But has it ever occurred to you that they were there because being in love with Ted Bundy worked for them?

Instead of looking at him as this charming manipulative sociopath fooling these women

Has it occurred to you that she was manipulating him too?

Judas and Ted Bundy and Jeremy Noyes 

Sinners that God so loved he gave his only son 

God and Abraham would sacrifice their sons for the sins of the world

And so do you think yourself holy when you hurt your kids to hurt their mother? To punish her for leaving? For putting asunder what You joined together?

Because it was never about God 

And always about you 

And you, are a jealous and vengeful little demigod 

So easily beat by Brigid and Mother Moon

June 19, 2008 (or, Tequila!)

19 Tuesday Jun 2018

Posted by elizabethspaardo in kids, love, marriage, medicine, my awesome husband, PTSD, Rape, Uncategorized

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Tags

children, family, forgiveness, Justice, laughter, love, medical school, medicine, Possibility, PTSD, rape, sexual assault, trauma, truth

It was raining this morning as I headed out for my run. Ten years ago on this day, though, it was hot and sunny. I know this because I can remember the beads of sweat rolling down the back of my legs as I sat in my green minivan in that long, heavy, black Land’s End skirt I’d bought on clearance a few weeks before. My air conditioner was broken and the van churned out warm air as I sat staring down at my phone.

I’d programmed the phone number for the Pittsburgh field office of the FBI into it a couple months before under the name “Hope.” It was finally time to call. I knew he might kill me. Knew he might kill my two boys. Mies had just turned 4. Max was 2 1/2. I asked God to please protect them but told Him if something happened to them, I knew it just was what it had to be. I had to turn him in. I could never face my babies again if I didn’t. I didn’t want them to live in that kind of world. Abraham, I am feeling you, brother.

I operated purely through adrenaline at that time. Until he was arrested in August. And released on bail to a local podiatrist. And jailed again since he, ya know, had threatened to kill me and my kids and all. And then as I fought to stay in school as my med school slut shamed me and tried to get rid of me. Once the adrenaline stopped flowing continuously later that Fall, the real hell began. PTSD.

I wanted to give up but I somehow got to a place where I told myself, this isn’t it. Someday things will get better. You will watch your babies grow up. You will become a doctor and take care of your patients. You might even get married and have more babies. Maybe a daughter. Maybe. I fought off the hopelessness. I convinced myself there was possibility.

Here I am ten years later. With five beautiful kids (including a sassy-sweet daughter). With a handsome, devoted husband. With a practice of my own, complete with amazing patients I care about more than I knew I could. Healed of my PTSD. Having forgiven Jeremy and even Sylvia, the head of my med school, and all those professors who betrayed me. Training for a semi-impossible obstacle course race with my husband and a trainer, for goodness sake. A trainer. More than I dreamed possible.

I am so grateful to God my babies are alive. That I am alive. That I am a doctor. That I have the husband and kids I do.

I skipped work today and drove through the country to Deer Lakes park to go running. The rain and grey gave way to fluffy white clouds and sunshine in a beautiful blue sky. I held my hand out the sunroof as I drove. I felt the sweat run down my legs from my run as I drove.I sang along to Tequila! like a fool. I’m sure I looked and sounded ridiculous.

I pray the little girls he hurt find the peace I have. I pray he does too.

I am so grateful for today. I am alive, I am free. Thank you God.

Tequila!

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